The Family Empowerment Program: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Working with Multi‐Stressed Urban Families

Abstract

The family empowerment program (FEP) is a multi-systemic family therapy program that partners multi-stressed families with an interdisciplinary resource team while remaining attached to a "traditional" mental health clinic. The rationale for this model is that far too often, families presenting at community mental health centers struggle with multiple psychosocial forces, for example problems with housing, domestic violence, child care, entitlements, racism, substance abuse, and foster care, as well as chronic medical and psychiatric illnesses, that exacerbate symptoms and impact traditional service delivery and access to effective treatment. Thus, families often experience fragmented care and are involved with multiple systems with contradictory and competing agendas. As a result, services frequently fail to harness the family's inherent strengths. The FEP partners the family with a unified team that includes representatives from Entitlements Services, Family Support and Parent Advocacy, and Clinical Staff from the agency's Outpatient Mental Health Clinic practicing from a strength-based family therapy perspective. The goal of the FEP is to support the family in achieving their goals. This is accomplished through co-construction of a service plan that addresses the family's needs in an efficient and coherent manner-emphasizing family strengths and competencies and supporting family self-sufficiency.

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

“…Madsen offers an extremely helpful exposition of how collaborative helping maps—which collaboratively articulate vision, obstacles, supports, and ultimately a plan—can be enormously useful in this process. Madsen's paper taps into a growing trend of the application and adaptation of systemic concepts and family therapy methods to a wide range of social contexts (Cleek, Wofsy, Boyd‐Franklin, Mundy, & Howell, ; Elizur, ; Kotzé, Hulme, Geldenhuys, & Weingarten, ; Ungar, Liebenberg, Landry, & Ikeda, ).…”

Considering the Role of Stress in Populations of High-Risk, Underserved Community Networks Program Centers

“…Today, African Americans in our target communities often are employed in low-status, 107 low-control, 108 insecure, service sector jobs that typically entail little physical activity and frequently require working odd and/or long hours. 109 Disproportionately, they reside in rural and impoverished urban communities that are unsafe, offer limited access to healthy foods, and provide little opportunity for physical activity.…”

“…Our work with churches, as cited, and other community partners is predicated on making connections with social and economic structures in which the community operates to promote health and sustain change. The SCCDCN has developed programs that engage women, who are disproportionately represented as community leaders and heads of households, as a means to address the range of “upstream” factors, from examining institutional racism to increasing economic opportunity and enabling healthy lifestyle choices (e.g., building on plant-based dietary traditions of the African Diaspora, promoting social ties among community members, 99,108 and engaging in culturally salient physical activities).…”

Preliminary Mapping of Posdaya Performance as Family Empowerment Program

“…This is accomplished through co-contruction of a service plan that addresses the family's needs in an efficient and coherent manner-emphasizing family strengths and competencies and supporting family self-sufficiency (Cleek, Wofsy, Boyd-Franklin, Mundy, & Howell, 2012). According to Muljono (2013b) based on the performance of a sample Posdaya studies generally have not reached the optimum score for each of the variable measured.…”