Nurturing the One, Supporting the Many

Since its establishment in 1978 the Center for Family Life has been an integral source of assistance to immigrant families in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a community struggling with poverty, unemployment, health issues, drug-related problems, youth gang activity, a housing shortage, and oversubscribed schools. This book is a narrative of the development of the Center and its relations with the surrounding community. With its unique combination of community-rootedness and clinical sophistication, the Center serves as a programmatic model for other family service contexts. Underlying the Center's programs and the staff's interactions with families is a philosophy and theoretical orientation that embraces clients in a shared sense of responsibility for change, focuses on all family members and on families as systems, and emphasizes the developmental and the expressive. Almost 30% of the community's children and youth are participating in one or more Center services over the course of a year. Such services include after-school childcare, summer camp, creative and performing arts programs, recreation, youth development and parent education, employment programs for adults and youth, comprehensive emergency services to meet family needs for food, clothing, and financial assistance; individual, family, and group counseling; and neighborhood foster care. The authors supply case studies and supporting theoretical material, and discuss the implications for professional practice, education, research, and policy that can be derived from studying the Center's experience.

Currently on leave from the faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work where she served for seven years as associate dean, Dr. Peg Hess is Associate Director for Research and Scholarship at the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina. Brenda McGowan (D.S.W., Columbia University) is Ruth Harris Ottman Professor of Family and Child Welfare at the School of Social Work at Columbia University. She has written numerous articles on family preservation. Michael Botsko (Ph.D., Columbia University, School of Social Work) is the Senior Program Evaluation Associate for Bailey House in New York City and a former consultant for the Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for New York.