Partnerships

The Full Frame Initiative (FFI) works in partnerships to increase equitable access to wellbeing in the United States. Many of these selected projects focus on deepening the understanding and application of the Five Domains of Wellbeing by organizations and across systems; all are grounded in the values of seeing people in the full frame of their lives.

Partnership with Missouri Division of Youth Services
Systems Integration in Massachusetts
Partnership with Missouri Children’s Division
Partnership with St. Louis Courts
Kids Deserve Wellbeing
Resources from Past and Completed Projects

Partnership with Missouri Division of Youth Services (DYS)

FFI’s deep partnership with Missouri DYS began in 2011 to help youth involved in the juvenile justice system successfully transition back to their families and communities, ultimately becoming productive citizens and leading fulfilling lives. FFI and DYS are working together to integrate FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing into treatment and transition planning and to engage the range of formal and informal supports youth need to achieve better and more sustainable outcomes. DYS is integrating FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing at systemic, facility and treatment levels, and is seeing more successful transitions by explicitly aligning its continuum of services with the Five Domains of Wellbeing. FFI and DYS are co-creating new clinical practices, tools, training curricula and quality assurance processes to fully embed a wellbeing orientation. For example, the new treatment planning process co-created by FFI and DYS now encourages youth and families to engage in conversations with DYS staff about their hopes and dreams, as part of the initial assessment. Parents have been touched, expressing that they are rarely asked about anything other than what they need.  The experience of youth and families involved in DYS is markedly different than their experience in other systems.

EVIDENCE (January 2018): Missouri DYS: A Leveraged Investment in Lasting Change
RESOURCE (NOVEMBER 2016): The Five Domains of Wellbeing for Youth and Youth Involved in the Juvenile Justice System
WEBINAR RECORDING (DECEMBER 2014): Applying an Adolescent Wellbeing Focus in Juvenile Justice Assessment and Treatment Planning

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Systems Integration in Massachusetts: Preventing and Ending Homelessness among Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence
FFI is part of Massachusetts’ state reform efforts to create a more survivor-centered, effective, and efficient government response to domestic and sexual violence and homelessness, and will enable survivors who are homeless or at imminent risk for homelessness to have access to the formal and informal supports they and their families need to live and thrive securely in their communities. FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing framework is a core element of this work, outlined more fully in a state-released plan that recommends action in eight areas, ranging from training to examining regulations. All recommendations are anchored in a set of principles to ensure the inclusion of survivors’ perspectives, the involvement of the community, and the recognition of people’s needs in the Five Domains of Wellbeing. The Integration Task Force, charged with carrying out the recommendations of the plan, is a collaboration of four MA state agencies across two secretariats, two executive office interagency councils and three statewide coalitions of nonprofit organizations. Though this state initiative uses FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing as a tool for improving government response to a specific population, it has been introduced in a way that encourages state agencies to explore further applications to programs such as child welfare, general domestic violence programs and general homelessness services.
More information about the Integration Task Force.

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Partnership with Missouri Children’s Division: A Revolution in Child Welfare

FFI’s partnership with Missouri Children’s Division (CD) is engaging and uniting government, nonprofit and community stakeholders in a common strategy to improve the long-term safety and wellbeing of children and families. FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing has been named the foundation of the state’s child welfare practice model, and is being applied by a growing number of connected systems and programs to strengthen inter-agency collaboration, transform practice and policy, and ensure that safety is a stepping stone to long-term wellbeing. CD is building a values-driven, evidence- and data-informed child welfare culture based on seeing families in the full frame of their lives in order to safely reduce the number of children in care. Because child welfare reaches well beyond the bounds of any one agency, CD and FFI are collaborating across systems and pro-actively engaging community partners so that there can be a consistent, systems-wide focus on child and family wellbeing from the start. The genesis of this transformation was a series of seven Community Conversations co-hosted by CD and FFI in 2014, using the award-winning film Rich Hill as a tool for seeing families differently. These events surfaced ideas for change and magnified the desire among diverse stakeholders to re-envision child welfare as a shared community responsibility.
RESOURCE (SEPTEMBER 2016) Trauma Informed Pathways to the Five Domains of Wellbeing
WEBINAR RECORDING (MAY 2016) Wellbeing, the Missing Piece of the Safety and Permanency Puzzle: A Different Approach from Missouri Children’s Division
PUBLIC REPORT (AUGUST 2015) The Community Conversations: Listening for Change

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Partnership with St. Louis Courts

Since 2016, FFI has been partnering with the Family Court of St. Louis County and the Family Court of St. Louis City Juvenile (delinquency) and Child Protection Services units to support these systems to orient around wellbeing. For the courts, this work is a key strategy for improving long-term outcomes for the youth and families they work with, many of whom are also involved with other systems and formal support services. Work with each court is described below. The resonance between the projects and the use of a shared framework across court circuits also helps families who may be involved in both city and county proceedings.

City Family Court Juvenile Division (22nd Circuit)

FFI’s partnership with this court began with the delinquency unit to support this system to orient around wellbeing, with the stated goals of increasing family engagement with court personnel, increasing families’ participation in developing their own case plans, increasing families’ connection to their neighborhoods and communities, and reducing court order violations. This intensive work began by bringing together a subset of supervisors, managers and Deputy Juvenile Officers (court staff who work directly with youth and families) to design and implement guiding principles and enhance processes, tools and forms to include attending to the Five Domains of Wellbeing and tradeoffs. Our partnership focuses on shifting the culture of the court to use a wellbeing orientation to support youth and families in making lasting change, coaching and capacity building on identifying tradeoffs and working with families to minimize those tradeoffs, redesigning family engagement processes that support a wellbeing orientation and increased family involvement, and supporting staff in bringing the language of tradeoffs into their work with families and helping families identify their own strengths and assets. In 2017, FFI also started working with the Child Protection unit, focusing specifically on capacity building of supervisors, with the ultimate goal of equipping supervisors to increase access to wellbeing for their supervisees, as a foundational component of the parallel process when those supervisees increase access to wellbeing for families.

Partnership with Family Court of St. Louis County (21st Circuit)

FFI and a diverse group of county court staff have been collaborating to develop strategy, tools and a plan for capacity building in order to shift the court’s culture, policy and practice toward a wellbeing orientation. This effort began with the enthusiasm for the Five Domains of Wellbeing by court staff at both the management and field levels. As part of this partnership, a subset of managers and field staff volunteered early on for additional responsibilities and committed to stronger engagement around wellbeing and tradeoffs to support better, lasting outcomes for youth and families. This design group worked intensively with FFI for a year and a half to redraft forms and tools to reflect a wellbeing orientation and recommend these and other changes to court leadership. This work, with the support of unit directors and court leadership, has been adopted across delinquency services. An official rollout of wellbeing oriented processes, tools and forms in January 2018 began the next phase of the partnership. Already, Deputy Juvenile Officers are describing how a wellbeing orientation has helped dramatically shift the conversation to engage youth and families in new ways, as well as putting families at ease as they arrive for the initial meeting. These pieces are the foundation for surfacing information about tradeoffs and the Five Domains of Wellbeing, which are critical to unlocking the door to sustainable change.

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Kids Deserve Wellbeing, St. Louis

Every kid deserves access to a set of elements and experiences that research shows are necessary for health and hope and that add up to wellbeing. Yet access to wellbeing is limited for the 44% of kids in St. Louis who live in poverty and the 13% of kids in St. Louis County who live in poverty, a number that hides the pockets of poverty amidst affluence. These kids are the significant majority of the 3396 families referred to City and County Court Child Protective Services in 2015, when St. Louis Children’s Division received 15,348 child abuse/neglect reports. Kids with child welfare involvement are more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system, and youth who have aged out of foster care face more chronic health problems, unemployment, homelessness and other negative outcomes. Only about half graduate from high school. Kids Deserve Wellbeing is a government/nonprofit/community partnership bringing a wellbeing orientation to community and to the systems and services that can disproportionately block or enhance wellbeing. This effort builds on and works with other collaborative efforts in St. Louis.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY (FEBRUARY-MARCH 2018) Join us for a free full-day training in St. Louis to learn more about the Five Domains of Wellbeing framework and how a focus on wellbeing can support positive change for kids and families!

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Resources from past and completed projects

The Learning from What Goes Well project was an integral part of the growing movement among DV advocates and other stakeholders who are eager to focus on existing community assets and collaborate across fields to make systems more survivor-driven, and to support safety in the larger context of survivor wellbeing. The project created a capacity building collaborative with three community teams: the California Hmong Advocates Network (working with Hmong advocates in Fresno to provide peer support, visibility and strengthen culturally-aligned services for Hmong survivors), the Community Doula Project (developing relationships with maternal health care providers around birth justice and increased access to doula care for low-income people, people of color and survivors of domestic violence), and Peace Pros LA (providing training and programs with messaging around gender norms and masculinity to support anti-violence efforts at Santa Monica College). Teams grew their knowledge and capacity to apply new asset-based skills and perspective to their efforts to change systems in ways that will increase access to or the quality of supports for people in their community who are experiencing domestic violence and other forms of violence and oppression. Learning from What Goes Well was led by five partnering organizations: the Full Frame Initiative; Alliance for Community Transformations; Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse; Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles; and Break the Cycle.
Learning from What Goes Well: A Capacity Building Collaboration to Support Communities Experiencing Violence and Oppression

The Greater Boston Full Frame Network (GB Network) brought together cross-disciplinary social service organizations working across issue silos to improve systems response on multiple levels for people and communities struggling at the intersection of poverty, violence, trauma and other obstacles. These organizations and FFI envision a funding and policy environment in Greater Boston in which organizations aligned with the Full Frame Approach are valued, explicitly supported, and able to sustainably practice in ways that are most effective. In January 2016, FFI released its toolkit for philanthropy, a collaborative effort with partners in philanthropy and organizations from the GB Network.
SHIFT: From Short-Term Change to Lasting Wellbeing Through the Full Frame Approach A Toolkit to Help the Philanthropic Community Support Transformative Practice

Integrated Responses to Domestic Violence in California: Examining Where Differing Assumptions About Success Impede or Enable Survivor Wellbeing was a multi-year study and project that documented how various stakeholders—domestic violence survivors, practitioners providing services to survivors, funders and policymakers—understand and define survivor success, and identified opportunities for strengthening system response for survivors. It was guided by a 21-person National Advisory Council and supported by more than 200 domestic violence advocates, practitioners, researchers, policy advocates and funders. The resultant findings and recommendations for action contained in the report are an influential contribution to the domestic violence field, and have meaning far beyond as we see interest growing in other fields.
How Do Survivors Define Success? A New Project to Address an Overlooked Question  

The Domestic and Sexual Violence Cohort Demonstration Project (DSV Cohort) was co-created by FFI and a group of ten exemplary domestic and sexual violence organizations, unique among the field for their commitment to strengthening their work with survivors who face multiple additional challenges and to moving away from focusing solely on the violence. These organizations specifically sought out FFI for its experience with the complex, intersecting issues of poverty, trauma and violence, as well as its approach of putting whole people and their progress towards wellbeing at the center, rather than prioritizing fixing discrete problems or deficits. In 2013, FFI convened these organizations to examine the current challenges in the field, understand how the Five Domains of Wellbeing can be used to enhance responses to survivors, and begin to chart a course to strengthen the systems and services of the field. This report presents the DSV Cohort’s compelling case for change.
Domestic and Sexual Violence Cohort Demonstration Project: Taking action to move from services to social change

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