Family-Centered Services Project
923 Mount Auburn Street
Watertown, MA 02472
617-923-1770
www.family-centeredservices.org
madsen1@comcast.net

William Madsen, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Family-Centered Services Project (FCSP) in Massachusetts. FCSP is a training and consultation effort designed to support the development of family-centered philosophy and practice through training, organizational consultation, ongoing coaching, and technical assistance. FCSP uses an appreciative inquiry approach to help community agencies and larger jurisdictions develop institutional structures and organizational cultures that support more respectful and responsive ways of serving families.
Bill provides international training and consultation regarding collaborative approaches to helping and ways to enhance organizational readiness to embrace family-centered work. He has written numerous articles on these topics and is the author of Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families (2nd Edition). He is currently working on another book Collaborative Helping: Towards More Supportive Services, which highlights a simple inquiry-based practice framework for family support, outreach, child welfare and residential workers across many different contexts.

Previously, Bill was the director of training at Family Institute of Cambridge and a senior associate at Public Conversations Project. He has spent most of the past 30 plus years straddling the down and dirty world of frontline, public sector practice and the exciting, but more esoteric world of social constructionist, postmodern, and post-structuralist theorizing. Most of his contributions to the field have resulted from attempts to negotiate the dilemmas that arise in this boundary spanning position. The book, Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families was an attempt to adapt cutting edge family therapy concepts to frontline practice in a way that made them both accessible and relevant. The Family-Centered Services Project has been an attempt to build supportive environments for workers embracing more collaborative ways of working (e.g. moving from a focus on developing family-centered workers to a focus on developing family-centered agencies). And the current Collaborative Helping Project is an attempt to expand these previous efforts to a broader audience and offer a simple, but comprehensive map that can both help frontline workers think their way through complex situations and offer a structure to guide conversations between workers and families about challenging issues.

Articles written by William Madsen, Ph.D.:

1. Collaborative Helping: A Practice Framework for Family-Centered Services
2. Teaching across Discourses to Sustain Collaborative Clinical Practice
3. Sustaining a Collaborative Practice in the “Real” World (from Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families)
4. Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families