Applications of Collaborative Helping Maps: Supporting Professional Development, Supervision and Work Teams in Family‐Centered Practice

Abstract

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.

Editorial: New Frontiers for Family Therapy‐Family Centered Practice and Neuroscience

“…Bill Madsen () describes a process of creating collaborative helping maps in family‐centered practice in his article. Madsen's work is anchored in the core principles of accountability, believing in resourcefulness, and working in collaboration with families and those that help families.…”

Narrative Approaches to Organizational Development: A Case Study of Implementation of Collaborative Helping

“…They are also being used to organize wraparound meetings, family group conferencing, and larger system meetings. They have been expanded to guide efforts to support professional development and supervisory, team, and organizational functioning (Madsen, ). I have previously written about ways that narrative ideas and practices might contribute to family‐centered approaches (Madsen, , ).…”

Editorial: Narrative and Poststructural Perspectives in Couple and Family Therapy

“…Madsen (2016) uses his "Collaborative Helping Maps," a unique integration of approaches for frontline workers, in an application for organizational development. Following his earlier papers about collaborative helping in clinical settings in Family Process (Madsen, 2011(Madsen, , 2014a, Madsen extends these maps to organizational consulting and ongoing coaching with several examples to illustrate this work.…”