This article offers a framework for collaborative family-centered practice that can rein-vigorate our work with families who have not responded to more traditional approaches. Collaborative Helping is grounded in family-centered principles that include: striving for cultural curiosity, believing in resourcefulness, working in partnership, and making our work more accountable to the clients we serve. The article introduces collaborative inquiry as an organizing metaphor for clinical practice and offers a five-step practice framework with clinical illustrations and sample questions. The framework draws from appreciative inquiry, motivational interviewing, the signs of safety approach to child protection work, and solution-focused and narrative therapies.

This article highlights "disciplined improvisation" as a metaphor for community-based work with multi-stressed families. It introduces Collaborative Helping maps as a tool that both helps workers think their way through complex situations with families and provides a structure to support constructive conversations between workers and families about challenging situations. The article illustrates this map through a clinical vignette and uses interviews with workers to highlight ways in which the map can both enhance worker thinking and support constructive conversations between workers and families about problems that could easily divide them and lead to polarization and escalating tension.

This article examines the interconnections between family therapy, specifically postmodern and poststructural approaches, and family-centered services. It introduces particular applications of family-centered services such as systems of care, wraparound, family-driven care, the recovery movement, and family group conferencing and then summarizes the heart of family-centered approaches as a shift in how services are provided to families. It examines the "fit" between the values and principles of family-centered practice and postmodern/poststructural approaches and then offers particular ideas and practices from these approaches that can help frontline workers inhabit a spirit of respect, connection, curiosity and hope in their work.

Noncompliance with medical treatment is examined in the context of the interaction between the family system and the professional treatment system. The authors present a systemic framework for conceptualizing medical noncompliance that examines the ways in which difficulties in treatment may develop at the level of meaning (divergent beliefs) or at the level of action (interactional sequences). They then briefly discuss how the model can be used for assessment and intervention.Sam, a 55-year-old retired man, has been coming to health-care clinics on the average of once every two or three weeks for over 30 years. Each time, he presents with a different mix of chronic complaints, including hypertension, arthritis, stomach pains, impotence, and obesity. Over the years, many different resident physicians have become locked in lengthy and unsuccessful struggles with Sam over treatment, especially for his weight, and none has experienced much success. Although he comes for treatment regularly, nothing ever seems to get much better, and although nothing ever seems to get better, he continues to come regularly. At this point, he has trained more physicians during their residencies than the residency director, and many have become frustrated enough to dread his visits.Although this case may be an extreme example, most health-care professionals have experienced the frustration of similar situations.* Such difficul-

Collaborative, family-centered practice has become an influential approach in helping efforts across a broad spectrum of human services. This article draws from previous work that presented a principle-based, practice framework of Collaborative Helping and highlighted the use of Collaborative Helping maps as a tool both to help workers think their way through complex situations and to provide a guideline for constructive conversations between families and helpers about challenging issues. It builds on that work to examine ways to utilize Collaborative Helping maps at worker, supervisory, and organizational levels to enhance and sustain collaborative, family-centered practice and weave its core values and principles into the everyday fabric of organizational cultures in human service agencies and government agencies that serve poor and marginalized families and communities.