Families and Schools Together Program

The Families and Schools Together Program outlines a social work prevention initiative, tracing how it evolved, was adapted and studied, and was ultimately disseminated worldwide. The founder Lynn McDonald explains that the title ‘Families and Schools Together’ (FAST) describes a prevention program grounded in academic theory and standardized child mental health questionnaires. Through rigorous research and cost-benefit studies, it evolved into a strategy that has been recognized and included on lists by the US Government, EU, and the UNODC (United Nations Office of Drugs and Delinquency). FAST was developed to promote both child and adolescent mental health and social capital for children and families living in low-income communities with socially marginalized populations. The positive approach aims to build protective factors for the child which are based on relationships, including strengthening the parent-child bond, the bonds within the family, the bonds across families, the bonds with the school, and the bonds with the community. This multi-family group program is based on experiential learning, with no lectures and no handouts. Case studies are included about the cultural adaptations into a wide range of rural and urban locations from Kazakhstan and Tehran to the United States. Social contexts of these places are presented for the adaptations to be understood. Accounts about doing FAST with wealthy families and upper middle-class families are included, as well as those with political refugees. The challenges of funding each of these trainings and implementations are described, as well as the failures of the program and what was done to ensure they were not repeated. Overall, The Families and Schools Together Program is about how a program based on theory and good sense helped hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents have a better life in their families and communities.

Lynn McDonald is a retired Professor of Social Work at Middlesex University. Prior to this she worked in Social Work and Psychiatry at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at UW Madison. Drawing on this expertise in Social Work, Psychiatry, and Psychology, she developed the Families and Schools Together (FAST) Program at Madison Family Service agency in 1988. This program has since run in 24 countries globally.