Even as we type, my colleague and good friend David is in Portland Oregon, teaching a couple of courses on facilitating family decision making group-based service teams. What a mouthful THAT phrase was! These courses are based on work he and I have done here at CFRP over the past dozen or so [...]

Being neutral doesn’t mean you are passive. Good facilitators know when to pull the group’s attention toward them and when to step back and get out of the way. You should take a seat or otherwise get out of the way when a group is talking well about its content (aka topics [...]

A word today about facilitator neutrality: what it is, what it isn’t and why it’s essential to program success. Many programs assume that a counselor or social worker is (or should be) prepared to facilitate team meetings. We beg to differ. Our facilitation model is based on the work first developed [...]

Decision-making is a fascinating field. Do you know the difference between a "tough" decision and a "bad" one? Not every bad outcome is the result of a bad decision, just like not every GOOD outcome is the result of a good decision. Decision theorists describe tough decisions as ones that are:

Complex
Ambiguous, and/or
Conflictual

Tell [...]

Today while walking across the parking lot I encountered one of our conference facilitators who asked me to say a word about “what happens when moral issues come up in conferences”. I peppered her with questions: how do these conversations differ from any other conversations in which there are intense feelings, difficult decisions and controversy [...]

OK, not really — but sometimes it feels that way. If we can’t get Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed or any other ascended master, we might have to settle for Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt. Desmond Tutu or Jimmy Carter if we’re desperate. Most of us simply don’t have [...]

Oh man, do you remember that Elton John song? I was about 18 or 19, wreaking havoc and leaving wreckage, when it was on Top 40 radio and whenever it played it was a like having a dagger run through my heart. OK, maybe not that bad. Why bring it up now, [...]

The word used to mean something. But in the human service bizz, it became popular with funders (for all the right reasons) and then became ubiquitous among service providers (for a few right reasons and a whole lot of wrong ones). Now it’s often sprinkled about and means little more than “agreement to share funding” [...]

What’s in a name?
Some of us remember when Carl Rogers stopped using the term “patient” and starting using “client” instead. 21 years ago I was working at a community mental health agency when I first took note of a movement afoot: mental health patient advocacy groups were eschewing the term “client” and referring to [...]

Here’s a question for all you family conferencers out there. It came up in a conversation I was in yesterday: what do you do when the child welfare system’s requirements for a family clash with the family’s cultural norms? Like when “the System” has your children because you “neglected” them by leaving a [...]