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 [...]

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle included this AP article about research on the self esteem of college students. Turns out they’ve got too much and it’s wrecking their ability to function in the interpersonal world. Here we have ourselves a case of unintended consequences. I came of age during the “human potential movement” [...]

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” [...]

From: Myers, David.G. (1996, 5th edition); Social Psychology, NY, Mc Graw-Hill, S. 339 ff
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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 [...]

OK, so our airwaves are full of politicos talking about Iraq in terms of whether or not there’s a “military solution” versus a “political solution”.
None of these people took our facilitation training, obviously. Otherwise they would not be settling for an argument framed in such binary terms.
I wonder if there’s a third way, a [...]

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 [...]

Although it’s not exactly a bodice-ripper, the Journal of Public Child Welfare offers an excellent primer on wraparound in its Volume 1, Number 2 issue for 2007. It was written by Dr. Charlie Ferguson who once interned at my office, bless his heart. He’s quite a bit smarter than the average bear, [...]