Strengths and Challenges to a Holistic Child Family Services Model

Julie Stein Broackway, LCSW, and Julia Jean-Francois, LCSW, Co-Directors, Center for Family Life

The Center for Family Life (CFL) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn has a 26-year history of service to individuals and families in this urban community. We articulate a holistic model of practice in which family development, youth development, and community-building services are delivered with integrity within our programs, and where the impact of each program is fundamentally shaped and/or multiplied by the presence of other services both within and outside of the Center’s system.

In collaboration with the adults, youth and families in this neighborhood, we assess community needs, develop and execute a comprehensive range of recreational, supportive and remedial services that sustain and strengthen the family, ensure the well-being of the community’s children, and contribute to an environment where individuals can maximize their potential as confident, capable adults.

The Center’s services include family counseling, neighborhood based foster care, school aged childcare, summer day camps, performing arts programming for children, adult and youth employment, food pantry and advocacy services.

Social Workers are Key to Community-Building Mission

Social workers at the Center for Family Life are the core professional group working to actualize our community-building mission. Practice methods include social group work with children, youth and adults in our school-based and youth development programs, family and individual counseling in our family counseling and foster care programs, and community development through our agency-wide efforts to influence local and national social welfare policy.

Using an ecological frame that considers the person in the context of the social/political/economic environment, social workers at the Center assess the impact of their interventions with groups and individuals within the personal or relational frame, as well as within the framework of the larger social and community context.

In collaboration with neighborhood-based institutions such as the local public schools, social workers partner with teachers, administrators and students during the school day to combine resources and knowledge and to enrich the teaching and learning environment so that children and youths can be helped to learn and to reach their potential.

Social workers at the Center are supported to develop an advanced set of professional skills that promote the purposeful use of self in their work and actualize the significant power of the social group - be it a family, peer group or community action coalition - to leverage positive change and support human development.

Overcoming Challenges to Achieve Successful Outcomes

Challenges to the provision of quality social work services come from sources both external and internal to the Center. Stable public and private financial resources for the maintenance of successful program models and for the expansion of programs to meet emerging community needs are scarce.

The Center also strives to overcome obstacles to provide the resources, training and support to new social work professionals. The intention is that they are enabled to develop advanced social group work skills, and to become expert in the purposeful use of self to promote nurturing human relatedness, all to address the goal of supporting the actualization of the community’s full human potential.

Finally, there are additional external challenges that arise due to the impact of the local and national domestic policy agenda on our overwhelmingly poor, largely immigrant community. The Center is also often constrained from responding to many emerging needs because of our community’s marginalization from systems of education, marketable skill development, wealth building, and their lack of legal status in order to leverage basic health and public benefits.

In spite of these challenges, the Center continues to successfully leverage limited resources, and through its holistic model of practice, “strengths-based” approaches, and community collaborations, it contributes to the positive development of the children and families that are served.

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