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To understand strengths‐based practice as articulated by urban Indigenous community workers and to consider its application for public health approaches to Australian Indigenous health advancement. Semi‐structured interviews with community workers from an urban Indigenous community. Interviews were video and audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using thematic analysis, using an Indigenist research framework. For our participants (11 Indigenous and one non‐Indigenous), a strengths‐based approach was fundamental to their practice. This approach reconfigured the usual relationship of client and service provider to fellow community member. They understood the strength of Indigeneity that empowers individuals and communities. They were not blinkered to the challenges in the community but resisted defining themselves, their community or their community practice by these deficits. Our participants had a sophisticated experiential understanding that a strengths‐based practice is not simply a ‘culturally acceptable’ way for non‐Indigenous peoples to work for Indigenous peoples, but rather it is the only way of working with Indigenous people. Strengths‐based practice requires a reconfiguring of relationships of power, of attending to structure over stereotypes, and privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. This reconfiguration is an ethical prerequisite for an approach that is genuinely strengths‐based.

This paper examines the academic research discourse on strengths-based practice in child welfare. A gap in the literature exists concerning systematic research studies addressing strengths-based practices with families in the child welfare system. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine how a strengths-based approach facilitates working relationships between child welfare services and families. A systematic review was performed following the principles of the PRISMA statement and included 11 peer-reviewed articles, published in English, in academic journals from multiple scientific databases, reporting primary research. Strengths-based skills were found to be essential to fostering a stronger rapport with families and to building relationships with them. Furthermore, strengths-based approaches facilitate personal engagement, which can increase the sense of empowerment and encourage families to find solutions and to make decisions about their own lives. One of the study’s findings suggests that in the process of empowering families, workers themselves learned to empower themselves. Workers shifting towards strengths-based thinking enhanced their sense of self-empowerment, which increased their knowledge and skills to help empower families. The findings of this review indicate that the strengths-based perspective reported from the studies facilitates positive interaction between workers and families, including collaboration and the building of relationships. Highlights The strengths-based approach fosters stronger relationships and enhances self-empowerment. Workers learned to help empower families by learning to empower themselves. A strengths-based perspective promotes the client-as-the-expert view.

Over recent years, a preventative approach has been promoted within adult social care policy and practice in England. However, progress has been somewhat inconsistent, in part due to issues around conceptualising what exactly prevention means within this context. Particularly since the financial crisis, there have emerged tensions between seeing prevention as a positive strategy to build assets and capability; as part of a neo-liberal project to roll back expectations for state support; or simply as a technocratic strategy to increase efficiency by deploying resources ‘upstream’ where they might have greater impact. This paper provides a critical perspective on how policy has unfolded over the last 15 years, which provides the context for an analysis of findings from a national survey of English local authorities and interviews with key stakeholders. These findings demonstrate a substantial commitment to preventative activity, but also some serious confusions and contradictions in how this agenda may be taken forward in the current policy environment.

Background: Custodial grandparents experience greater physical health declines and higher rates of depression than their same-age peers who do not provide care, and grandchildren in grandfamilies often have behavior problems. However, few researchers have explored the impact of self-care education on decreasing these negative outcomes. Our study examined how a self-care and life-skills intervention influenced health behavior change in a sample of grandparents and grandchildren. Methods: Data were collected during eleven focus groups (and two interviews) with 55 grandparents, and one focus group with five grandchildren, at 6 months after the 6-week intervention detailed in this paper. Grandparents ranged in age from 46 to 84 years old (M = 62.19, SD = 8.24). Participating grandchildren ranged in age from 9 to 12 years old. Focus group transcripts were coded for content related to grandparents’ and grandchildren’s positive behavior changes following the intervention. Findings: Grandparents reported taking more time for themselves, reducing negative self-talk, increasing healthy physical choices, and having better communication skills after participating in the intervention. Similarly, grandchildren reported increased confidence in making friends, making good decisions, and getting along with others. Findings suggest that a self-care and life skills program show promise for improving the health and wellness of grandfamilies.

Research on the effectiveness of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Programs has revealed that VR services are less effective for trauma-affected and Black consumers. For instance, consumers with trauma exposure disengage from services earlier than their non-traumatized counterparts, and Black consumers benefit less from each phase of VR services compared to others. One midwestern state’s VR program sought to address these disparities by offering trauma-informed and trauma-responsive services that emphasize cultural responsiveness, racial equity, and strengths-based practices. To begin this work, the state’s VR program collaborated with an applied research unit in a public university to establish two work groups: a communications group and a training group. The purpose of the communications group was to build a robust referral network within the VR Division and with other community-based agencies and providers, particularly for low-income, Black consumers. The purpose of the training group was to develop and deliver a training program to support VR professionals in providing trauma-informed and trauma-responsive services. Results from an evaluation of the training indicated that each training module generated for staff both reminders and new insights into ways to effectively work with consumers. Staff expressed that they wanted opportunities to further explore and apply the training content and needed additional, ongoing support to implement what they were learning. In response to staff needs, the state’s VR program is continuing to invest in this community–university partnership by establishing communities of practice for staff and evaluating the effectiveness of the training program.

The recent application of strengths-based practice in child protection settings has been accompanied by evidence of inconsistent implementation and concerns that the approach is incompatible with statutory work. Few studies have moved beyond asking whether child protection workers are implementing strengths-based practice to explore why the approach is enacted as it is. This article describes a mixed methods study using an online survey and interviews to elicit from 225 statutory child protection workers in a large Canadian agency how they applied strengths-based ideas and why they did what they did. The authors found that although strengths-based practice was popular, 70 percent of participants believed that it was not always applicable to child protection work. Participants described five distinct versions of the approach, only one of which was fully congruent with their mandated role. The study suggests that the common conflation of strengths-based and solution-focused approaches ignores important differences in the conceptualization of practitioner authority and leaves practitioners attempting to implement versions of strengths-based practice that do not fit statutory child protection work. Only when practitioners choose solution-focused models that support their use of mandated authority is consistent implementation a reasonable expectation.

In a midwestern city of the USA, the authors implemented the Leaving Homelessness Intervention Research Project—and its eight subprojects—to further understand homelessness as experienced by older minority women, develop intervention strategies to facilitate the movement of the participants out of homelessness, and illuminate the women's recovery process. After reviewing the social issue of homelessness among older African American women in the USA, and offering a framework on recovery and qualitative themes of recovery among participants involved in the Telling My Story subproject, the authors present a four-factor model of recovery-focused practice. The model reflects two recovery paradigms: one that is responsive to the negative consequences people experience as a result of their exposure to extreme situations, such as homelessness, and a proactive one in which assistance is designed to help people in recovery advance their own self-development and move forward their process of individuation.

In the last five years, several scholars have collaborated in an integrated research program focused on students identified with both academic talents and autism spectrum disorder (2eASD) with support from a Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education grant. Several different empirical studies were initiated and completed during this period, investigating the ways in which some of these twice-exceptional students have been able to be successful in secondary school and highly competitive colleges. In this article, we summarize findings from several of these studies, synthesizing implications and recommendations with a goal of offering research-based practices, especially related to healthy social and emotional development and strong academic achievement in students identified as 2eASD.

The concepts of strengths and resilience are essential for understanding and promoting positive development in children and adolescents. These concepts have been studied in the research literature for many years and more recently have been applied to child and adolescent assessment and intervention research. However, strength and resilience based intervention programs have not been evaluated rigorously for their use of empirical methodology. In this article, we systematically identified and reviewed all of the outcome studies over the last decade for strength and resilience based intervention programs to assess the extent to which these studies utilized controlled empirical methodology. The results of the review yielded 11 outcome studies that examined strength and resilience based practices. Using the Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies developed by the Effective Public Health Practice Project, we found three studies to be high quality, exhibiting high levels of experimentally controlled research. The remaining 8 studies we considered to be moderate to weak quality research. We concluded that these 11 studies provide preliminary support for the efficacy of strength and resilience based interventions. Our systematic review also highlights areas where methodology in future studies can be strengthened to provide more conclusive evidence of these approaches.

In this autoethnographic article we focus on the issues of “disability” and “inclusive education” and the challenges of being positive and affirming in this area of research and practice. As a teacher, I (Alina) continue to encounter regularly the dominant deficit view of “disability,” in spite of the extensive body of literature that advocates for the rights of people with disabilities as well as the benefits of inclusive education best built on strength-based thinking. The autoethnographic methodology allowed me to explore my experiences as an educator and reflect on specific events, presented through four vignettes that capture how my beliefs and values as an educator have formed over time. Throughout the article, I work closely with two academic colleagues (Ed and Jane), who become my critical friends, as I travel through this personal and professional journey that includes emotional reaction, reflection and academic analysis. I also engage with the emerging field of strength-based approaches to disability, as well as the importance of dialogue and justice, on an individual and professional level, with the aim of empowerment for students and teachers.