WrapAround to Transform Lives

​Now recruiting WrapAround Facilitators – you can volunteer and have an impact.

A single Mom with an 11-year- old son with Asperger’s phones the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in desperation – she needs help coping.

But the CAS can’t help her, because the child doesn’t need protection; she’s a good mother.
The worker suggests she call Children’s Mental Health Services, but Asperger’s doesn’t fall within its care mandate, so she’s redirected to Developmental Services. Developmental Services refuses her; the child’s IQ is too high. She reaches out to her son’s pediatrician, but he can’t provide ongoing support. Nor can the school system, whose resources are stretched to capacity.

All too frequently this is the end of the story for people like this Mom, who has fallen through the cracks of Ontario’s child welfare system. But, more and more, here in Northumberland County, we are rewriting this narrative.

As Green Wood Coalition prepares to expand the WrapAround services it has offered to single adults for the last few years, and WrapAround Northumberland continues its work with families, the two will work symbiotically, providing compassionate and empowering care to our community’s most vulnerable.

About 20 people gathered on September 25 at Green Wood Coalition in Port Hope for a Community 101 presentation on Wrap Around. Family therapist Mark Vander Vennen, who leads an active, volunteer-run WrapAround program in Hamilton, and WrapAround Northumberland Coordinator Jane Ashmore walked the group through a better way to serve individuals and families with complex needs.

“WrapAround, by definition, is a multi-sector approach,” Mark said. “It is about strengths, not deficits. It is a different paradigm.

"As a society, over the decades, we have offloaded the care of the most vulnerable to the professionals.But they are overburdened, and it has disempowered communities. If professional services and communities could work together in a different way and leverage each other’s strengths, the results could be better. That’s what WrapAround is – a different way of working together."

So how does it work? A facilitator-led team wraps around the individual participant who remains in control of the process from beginning to end. The facilitator and participant forge a relationship and build a team from among people the individual trusts. The facilitator leads what will begin as monthly team meetings where enduring, transformative solutions to the participant’s full spectrum of needs are sought. Over the next year to 18 months – the expected duration of a WrapAround team – the solutions are put into practice and the individual eventually transitions out.

In Northumberland County, in Hamilton where Mark coaches Wrap Around teams, and in parts of
Western Canada where WrapAround is taking hold, he has seen its success with single adults, children and families.
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“Nothing about us without us, no shame no blame. When WrapAround is practised with those values, research show there is nothing more effective.”

For more information contact Jenn McGuire jenn@greenwoodcoalition.com