Wraparound Services

Bethany for Children & Families has launched a new partnership with the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services to provide Wraparound Services aimed at helping families achieve the vision they have for themselves. Serving Rock Island, Henry, Mercer, and Whiteside counties, Bethany’s Wraparound staff works daily to help families acquire healthy habits, learn appropriate relationship skills, and stay together.

Wraparound is a planning process that follows a series of steps to help children and their families realize their goals. It is a planning process that brings people together from different parts of the whole family’s life. Wraparound is different for each family served, since the plans that are developed are tailored by the individual family.

Wraparound plans are comprehensive and address issues for clients at home, at school, and in the community including living environment; basic needs; safety; and social, emotional, educational, spiritual, and cultural needs. Another defining feature of Wraparound is that it is unconditional; if interventions are not achieving the outcomes desired, the team regroups to rethink the configuration of supports, services, and interventions to ensure success in natural home, school, and community settings.

Ten Principles of the Wraparound Process

Family-Driven: Planning is grounded in the family’s perspectives, and the team strives to provide options and choices such that the plan reflects individual family values and preferences.
Team-Based: The Wraparound team consists of individuals agreed upon by the family and committed to them through informal, formal and community support and service relationships.
Natural Support: The Wraparound team actively seeks out and encourages the full participation of team members drawn from the family member’s networks of interpersonal and community relationships. The Wraparound plan reflects activities and interventions that draw on sources of natural support.
Collaborative: Wraparound team members work cooperatively and share responsibility for developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating a single Wraparound plan. The plan reflects a blending of team member’s perspectives and resources, and it guides and coordinates each members’ work towards meeting the team’s goals.
Community Centered: The Wraparound team implements service and support strategies that take place in the most inclusive, most responsive, most accessible and least restrictive settings possible; and ones that safely promote child and family integration into home and community life.
Culturally Competent: The Wraparound process demonstrates respect for and builds on the values, preferences, beliefs, culture, and identity of the child/youth and family, and their community.
Individualized: To achieve the goals laid out in the Wraparound plan, the team develops and implements a customized set of strategies, supports and services.
Strengths-Focused: The Wraparound process and the Wraparound plan identify, build on and enhance the capabilities, knowledge, skills and assets of the child and family, their community and other team members.
Persistence: Despite challenges, the team persists in working toward the goals included in the Wraparound plan until the team reaches agreement that a formal Wraparound process is no longer required.
Outcome-Oriented: The team ties the goals and strategies of the Wraparound plan to observable or measurable indicators of success, monitors progress in terms of these indicators and revises the plan accordingly.