A Community Response to Tragedy: Individualized Services for Families

The murder of a 13-year-old young woman mobilized one community to initiate a wraparound service model for their most hard-to-reach families. These families struggled with parental substance abuse, youth at high risk, and associated complex needs cutting across existing categorical programs. The strength and empowerment based program, in which interventions were designed specific to each family, presented challenges in evaluating outcomes with traditional standardized instruments. This paper describes the project, its outcomes for families and youth, and the evaluation design that evolved to measure outcomes in a strength-based program with no uniform intervention.