Skip to competencies for Empowerment Skills for Leaders (ESFL)
Empowerment Skills for Family Workers (ESFW)
What competencies does Empowerment Skills for Family Workers teach? The ten chapters of the Worker’s Handbook, and ten corresponding modules of the Instructor’s Manual address the following FDC skills and competencies:
- A bone-deep longing for Freedom and self-respect
- Beyond “Providing Services”
- Does case management empower families?
- Core principles of family development
- Power and family development
- The family development plan
- Your mind and your brain
- The importance of family context
- Putting it all together as a family development worker
- Communicating with skill and heart
- Empathy: putting yourself in their shoes
- Understanding nonverbal communications
- Finding a good balance between listening and expressing yourself
- Listening well
- Saying what you mean clearly and respectfully
- Promoting cooperative solutions to conflicts
- Handling blame and criticism constructively
- Confronting people constructively when necessary
- Communicating about “hot topics”
- Working with families with language barriers and low levels of literacy
- Communicating using technology
- Presence
- Shifting your focus from “doing” to “being”
- Mindfulness-based stress reduction
- Mindfulness practice exercises
- Practical strategies for mindful family development work
- Clarifying a personal vision for your work
- Creating a support system at work
- Creating a support system for yourself
- Creating your own stress-reduction and wellness program
- Balancing work and family life
- Family Financial Literacy
- Living in this complex world
- What shapes families’ experiences and perspectives?
- Why is the ability to understand and engage with families important for family workers?
- Language and communication
- Language and family dynamics
- Meaningful discussions
- Helping your agency to develop competence in understanding and engaging with families
- What is assessment?
- Basic principles of strength-based assessment
- Confidentiality
- The family circles assessment
- Helping your agency choose strength-based assessment tool
- Establishing mutually respectful, trusting relationships with families
- Helping families build on their own strengths
- How to avoid families becoming dependent on you
- When and how to end the relationship
- Helping families use specialized services to become self-reliant
- Identifying specialized services and helping families gain access to them
- Recognizing the need for specialized services
- Making and following through on referrals
- Supporting family members in specialized programs
- Recognizing, referring, and supporting families needing specialized services
- Supporting military families and veterans
- Other specialized services commonly needed by families your agency works with
- Families with many complex problems
- Home visiting: A unique relationship
- A family development approach to home visiting
- How to enter a family’s home respectfully the first time and on future visits
- How to establish the purpose of the home visit
- Safety issues
- TV, dogs, another cup of coffee: Handling the practical matters of home visiting
- Home visits in child protection or other domestic violence situations
- Ongoing visits
- The importance of Community
- Helping families identify and strengthen their informal helping networks
- Support and advocacy groups
- Family conferences
- Teaching leadership skills to family members
- Collaboration
- Building respectful relationships with community service partners
- Coordination and cooperation: The first steps toward collaboration
- Different levels of collaboration: Individuals, front-line workers, and systems
- Keys to successful collaboration
- Practical pitfalls of collaboration-and how to turn them into advantages
- The bigger picture: How agency, state, and national policies affect your work
- Interagency training: A key to interagency collaboration
Empowerment Skills for Leaders (ESFL)
The five chapters of the Leader’s handbook, and corresponding modules of the Instructor’s Manual, address the following FDC skills and competencies:
- Leading an empowered workplace
- A bone-deep longing for freedom and self-respect
- Basic concepts of family development
- The learning process
- Characteristics of an empowered workplace
- The empowerment approach/deficit approach
- The effect of this paradigm shift on your organization and community
- Creating a “Gracious Space”
- Pioneers in changing the “power over” paradigm
- Empowering leadership: Pitfalls and potential
- Are you ready (for transforming your workplace)?
- FDC Core Principles adapted for supervisors and leaders
- Leaders as organizational role models
- Building your agency’s capacity for transformation
- Clarifying a personal vision for your work
- Shifting your focus from “doing” to “being”
- Mindfulness-based stress reduction
- Staying focused on the “vision” of supervision
- Resolving conflict
- Culture and a society of varied backgrounds
- Cultural competence
- Understanding your unique experience
- Your agency’s organizational uniqueness
- Developing a respectful organization