Praise for Collaborative Helping: A Strengths Framework for Home-Based Services

“Collaborative Helping is a must read for all community-based workers in multi-stressed social contexts. Prevalent intervention models, focused on reducing youth and family deficits, too often become problemsaturated and defeated by clients’ overwhelming life challenges. In contrast, the authors’ strength-based family centered approach—immediately practical and effective—breathes new hope, possibilities, and vision into their lives, encouraging their best efforts and mutual support toward their aspirations and positive growth.”
— Froma Walsh, PhD, Co-Founder & Co-Director, Chicago Center for Family Health; Mose & Sylvia Firestone Professor Emerita, The University of Chicago, Author, Strengthening Family Resilience

“Collaborative Helping provides a practical, principle-based approach for working alongside people in the community. Case managers and paraprofessionals who work in health, mental health, employment, and other organizations will benefit from reading and adopting both the collaborative, strength-based stance and the strategy for ‘mapping’ client plans and goals as described in this book.”
—Benjamin M. Ogles, Dean and Professor of Psychology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

“Rarely have I read a book that so clearly links theory to practice in such a useful way. This book is an insightful guide for making Health and Human Services more sympathetic to those who become part of complex systems. It offers a hopeful, engaging model of practice to help workers and their agencies respond effectively to families in crisis. It is a must read for every front-line worker and agency supervisor.”
— Michael Ungar, PhD, Co-Director, Resilience Research Centre, Professor of Social Work, Dalhousie University

This book is a guide that all helping professionals can use to navigate the complexities of home and community work by building collaborative relationships with clients and their families. Containing advice for working with individual clients and their families, it also provides strategies for dealing with reluctant and difficult clients using a strengths-based, client-centered perspective.

Drawing from the authors’ 60 years of combined experience in the field and numerous interviews with frontline practitioners and people seeking help, this resource uses stories to introduce and illustrate core ideas and practices. The book offers a framework for helping professionals across many different contexts to assist clients to envision desired lives, address long-standing problems, and develop effective coping strategies in the context of their local communities. Collaborative Helping is a road map, for workers such as case managers, child welfare workers, home health care workers, residential workers, as well as those who train, educate, and supervise those workers. This sustainable, strengths-based model of collaborative helping is widely applicable, including integrated care environments as well as organizations using a recovery and client-centered approach.