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Creating a Narrative-Based Practice Culture Across a Youth Serving Agency: The Phoenix Youth Program's Story

NCJ Number
226326
Journal
Residential Treatment for Children & Youth Volume: 25 Issue: 4 Dated: 2008 Pages: 319-332
Author(s)
Alison Little; Lesley Hartman; Michael Ungar
Date Published
2008
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This article details a series of seven workshops held to stimulate conversations about narrative therapy and its application to work with youth in non-clinical residential and community settings.
Abstract
The Phoenix Youth Program (PYP) facilitated a series of seven workshops representing all aspects of PYP’s continuum of care to create a context whereby practice with youth across the organization could be informed by narrative ideas. The goal was to create an organizational culture of intentional practice that challenges problem-saturated stories youth bring with them to programming by enhancing the discursive power of stories of survival, resilience, and hope. Each session began with a review of the previous session and review of PYP’s goals. This was followed with a review of homework, exercises, a presentation of theory, more exercises, and finally a discussion about how what was learned could be applied to daily practice situations. The sessions are participatory in nature. The seven sessions included: (1) contracting; (2) from truth to stories; (3) from stories to change; (4) externalizing conversations and practices; (5) co-creating alternative stories; (6) performing new identities, thickening alternative stories; and (7) pulling it all together. The workshops were facilitated by clinical social workers and a psychologist. The goal is to understand how non-clinical staff can integrate these concepts to create intentional practice organization-wide that promotes alternative stories for youth. References