Unconditional Care in Context: Engaging with Ecological Adversity

Unconditional Care in Context reclaims problems of ecological adversity --poverty, racism, housing instability, community disadvantage, food insecurity, and social disconnection -- as central to understanding and working with system-involved children and families. Child-serving systems typically define the struggles of these children and their families through a disorder lens of psychiatric diagnosis and family dysfunction. The interconnected burdens of financial stress, exclusion, disrupted parenting, and social isolation that regularly confront these families are often neglected or minimized. Without attention to these issues, intervention is limited to reactive strategies that require children and families to fail before they can receive support. Unconditional Care in Context reviews key sources of adversity and the efforts to undertake "macro level" intervention: system reform, program innovation and policy initiatives that address key sources of ecological adversity. These strategies, at the level of school campuses, neighborhoods, and child-serving systems themselves, often provide universal services that make prevention possible. When these supports are provided to families in a timely way children may not need treatment and parents are spared intrusive system interventions. Unconditional Care in Context also offers a roadmap for addressing issues of context and ecological adversity when individual work with children and families is necessary or is pursued by parents. This book is a call for the field of human service to reconnect with the concrete realities of families' real circumstances and enlarge its focus to include practices that are truly ecologically-informed.

John S. Sprinson, Ph.D., is Clinical Director of the Seneca Family of Agencies based in Oakland, California. Sprinson trained as a psychologist at Duke University and Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California at San Francisco. In addition to his 35 years of work at Seneca, Sprinson worked in clinical practice for many years in Oakland, California with children and families.
Ken Berrick is the founder of Seneca Family of Agencies, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving children and families unconditionally through comprehensive educational, mental health, juvenile justice, foster care, and permanency services. Berrick has used his unique combination of experience--serving on a school board and on various commissions revolving around both mental health and child welfare-- to take an integrated systems view of services for children and families. Berrick recently founded Just Advocates, an organization providing individualized support and systems advocacy for children and families.