Leaps Bounds Family Services

“Small and mighty”—that’s the reputation of Michigan-based Leaps & Bounds Family Services, an early-learning nonprofit that is highly respected as a successful example of sustainability, collaboration and effectiveness in responding to community needs. Founded in 1988, Leaps & Bounds has been shaped by Executive Director Denise Dorsz and her team to respond to the early-learning needs of children and families especially in communities at risk. In this book, you will learn how Denise and her team were chosen to be part of a nationally funded program to promote innovation. The book tells how they used that opportunity to expand into multi-lingual, culturally diverse neighborhoods—a huge challenge for such educational programs. For the first time, Denise and her team share their successful strategies and nuts-and-bolts tips for building an effective nonprofit focused on this kind of community-based work. Readers visit one of Leaps & Bounds’ Play and Learn groups, step inside the organization’s highly regarded Home Visiting program, and hear from team members and parents in the program about why these approaches work so well. This book is ideal for general readers—parents, educators and community leaders who want to develop strong, local nonprofit organizations. It’s useful reading for classes and training sessions on becoming more effective in these professional disciplines. The book also includes specific tips you’ll want to share with others. Look for other books in The Bib to Backpack Learning Series.

Parents play alongside children as they learn and grow. Teachers and parents raise challenging questions. We support these caregivers. Together, we observe, encourage and identify our collective strengths. We collaborate, building a healthier community. With the increasing demands of our lives, the importance of relationship building is often overlooked. Join us as we share our journey cultivating a multi-disciplinary network of relationships supporting children’s social emotional health and school readiness. Through this book and others in the bib to backpack learning series, we explain how these remarkable programs, started, evolved, and are successfully growing today. At Macomb Family Services we hope that by learning more about our innovative program you will feel inspired to do similar work in your own community.

Family–professional partnerships are essential to early intervention practice (birth–age 3). However, building and sustaining these partnerships is complex work. This book is about digging deeper and looking closer at what it takes to have successful relationships with each and every family. The authors explore seven partnership concepts, brought to life through the words and perspectives of families and professionals themselves. New and veteran professionals can use the lessons learned from these accounts to more effectively work with families. Each chapter ends with Questions for Daily Reflection to help early intervention professionals continue to develop their practice. The final chapter describes themes that result from and span the seven concepts as well as the systems needed to support successful family–professional partnerships. Book Features: Provides a set of concrete practices for partnering with families. Presents authentic voices of families and professionals in action. Promotes enhanced reflection as readers apply the lessons learned to their work. Recognizes and highlights the individual nature of each family–professional partnership. Includes tools to help plan, implement, and evaluate the use of the practices described.

This volume is directed toward research to practice issues related to partnering with families of children birth through age 5. This monograph and the next monograph focuses on family and school involvement issues in two age categories. This sixth volume analyzes family involvement practices across a variety of settings and programs at the early childhood level. The seventh monograph in this series addresses research and practices related to family–school issues in middle and secondary schools. The chapters address, to varying degrees, five themes based on the principles of familycentered partnerships: 1. Recognizing and respecting one anther’s knowledge and expertise; 2. Sharing information through two-way communication; 3. Sharing power and decision making; 4. Acknowledging and respecting diversity; and 5. Creating networks of support The monograph supports the accomplishment of these goals as a whole by providing important insights about exemplary programs and promising practices, informed by current research. Also it highlights policies and theoretical perspectives relevant to these aims. Individual chapters offer a variety of practical strategies and recommendations that families, early childhood practitioners, policymakers, and researchers can use to enhance their knowledge and strengthen their skills for partnering effectively.

Helping traumatized children develop the story of their life and the lives of people closest to them is key to their understanding and acceptance of who they are and their past experiences. The Child's Own Story is an introduction to life story work and how this effective tool can be used to help children and young people recover from abuse and make sense of a disrupted upbringing in multiple homes or families. The authors explain the concepts of attachment, separation, loss and identity, using these contexts to describe how to use techniques such as family trees, wallpaper work, and eco- and geno-scaling. They offer guidance on interviewing relatives and carers, and how to gain access to key documentation, including social workers' case files, legal papers, and health, registrar and police records. This sensitive, practice-focused guide to life story work includes case examples and exercises, and is an invaluable resource for social workers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term foster carers and other professionals working with traumatized children.