Family Group Conferencing: New Directions in Community-Centered Child and Family Practice

“Contemporary North American child welfare exists in a global context. Concerns about the prevention of child maltreatment, “permanency planning,” “risk assessment” in child protection, and “family support” in its numerous forms, increasingly define what has become a common agenda for policymakers, senior administrators, researchers, and practitioners in most industrialized countries. The recent exponential growth of technology means that service innovations once considered “local” now find their way rather rapidly into what has become an international discourse on innovative practice. Thus, “patch” programs of geographically based integrative services from the United Kingdom are “imported” to the United States at the same time as “family preservation” strategies are “exported” to a wide range of venues from western Europe to Australia.”