The Family Center serves approximately 500 families a year. Our families cope with a myriad of challenges and stresses: most are poor; many are immigrants who share neither the language nor the customs of their new societies; they live in dangerous neighborhoods; some are under-and unemployed; there is inadequate housing; little-to-no health care; and the children often attend underperfoming schools. Some further struggle with drug addiction, abandonment, violence, or loss. Many come to the Family Center because they have lost- or are at risk of losing- their children.

We also provide practical support to our therapy clients. Problems such as inadequete housing, income, or safety can impede family healing. In such circumstances, counseling alone is insufficient. We work with our families to find creative solutions to practical problems. And if our families cannot come to us, we go to them.

Our professional staff is made up of racially and culturally diverse therapists, parent educators, and family advocates whose experiences mirror those of our clients. Native speakers of Haitian Creole, Spanish, and Portuguese provide services for families from these cultural backgrounds. We believe that only clinicians who have themselves experienced the dislocation and strain of acculturation and who know the values and customs of a family's native land can fully understand the stresses immigrant families face- or the cultural strengths they bring to solving their problems. We believe in meeting the needs of these diverse groups within all of the services we provide.

Evaluation is a critical component of Family Center programs. We want to know how well our services are working, for whom they are working, and how we can improve upon them. That's why we have a formal Outcomes and Evaluation Program. In consultation with the Institute for Community Health (a collaboration among three Massachusetts health care systems with a team of experts focused on advancing community health research), we use cutomized, culturally-sensitive outcomes tools to gauge changes not only in improvements in individual well-being but also in the relationships between family members. In addition to using our customized outcomes tools, The Family Center collects qualitative data by conducting focus groups with program participants. The data these evaluations supply help us deliver ever-better services to our families.