Communities of Care


Communities of Care

The values and core concepts of strength-based and family centered work are applicable to a variety of settings, work places, organizations, and disciplines. We have found the below listed topics to be of value to anyone who works with children and families—from clinically trained professionals, paraprofessional support staff, parents, and/or community based workers and volunteers of all types.

The Communities of Care Training and Learning Collaborative offers a variety of training and consultation around a wide array of topics. Below is a brief description of the training currently offered, but we are willing to work with any organization to combine and tailor the content to the needs of the audience. Trainings can be structured for a few hours to a few days, depending on the needs of the organization. We invite you to use the topics below as a general guide and discuss with us which areas or combination of topics will best suit your needs.

Most training is conducted by a professional and parent co-training team. We believe there is great benefit to modeling the parent-professional partnership as part of the training experience, as well as demonstrating first hand the different ways parents and professionals think about the same issues.

Introduction to Strength Based Work with Families
This provides an overview of CASSP (Child & Adolescent Service System Program) values and helps participants understand the rationale for family driven and strength based work. It also includes basic tools for strength based assessment and planning with families. The training is intended for professionals and para-professionals alike who work with children or families.

Working with Families—Becoming Family Driven and Strength Based
This is intended to be a more in depth training for those familiar with the basic concepts and values of strength based work, but who may be looking for specific skill development to enhance their work. Examples include: forming more positive working alliances with families; conducting strength based assessments; developing planning teams; creating strength-based plans; running a strength based program; integrating family members into your staff.

Wraparound
This training is designed to train professionals and/or para-professionals in the wraparound service planning process. It includes a review of the values underlying the wraparound model, conducting strength-based assessments, how to develop and facilitate wraparound teams, identifying needs and concerns, and creating and implementing wraparound plans.

Cultural Competence

This training focuses specifically on one of the key CASSP values—Cultural Competence and how it relates to the successful development of family-professional partnerships. This training can be tailored to the needs of the organization and can be more experiential to help participants raise their awareness, or more didactic to help build practical skills sets to enhance the demonstration of this value in day-to-day practice.

Partnering with Families

This training focuses specifically on another key CASSP value—parent-professional partnership. This is more of an experiential training which is intended to sensitize professionals to the ways in which we do our jobs can be isolating and disempowering for families. The goal is for workers to have a deeper appreciation for the importance of “family voice,” and to generate ideas for themselves as to how their individual practice can change to create more effective parent-professional partnerships.

If you are interested in consultation, please refer to our
Get To Know our Training Staff section
for the specific areas of expertise.

For further information about the Training and Learning Collaborative at Communities of Care, please contact

Patty Farrow at 508-856-5115 or patricia.farrow@umassmed.edu