Motivational Interviewing

Our Mission

We teach Motivational Interviewing not only as a set of tools but as a way of showing up when working with families who have complex needs. We focus on helping the agency and workforce improve alignment with their mission and reasons for doing this work and provide training that helps workers improve their sense of competency, job satisfaction, and alignment with their own values.

At its core, trauma-informed MI fosters authentic engagement and relationship-building, aiming for a deep understanding of a family’s unique needs, values, and strengths, without imposing prescriptive solutions. It requires a cultural shift in child welfare organizations, moving from a service-list approach to one prioritizing genuine engagement and supporting the material needs of families, thereby enabling them to better meet child safety and well-being.

Child welfare systems have been justifiably critiqued for their one-size-fits-all approach to services, particularly with families at risk of neglect due to the inability to meet basic needs, poverty, housing insecurities, and chronic systemic barriers that delay progress toward well-being. As a step toward addressing systemic power imbalances and improving family engagement in child welfare, we offer a Trauma-informed Motivational Interviewing (MI) training curriculum and organizational implementation approach.

Embedding a transformative case practice model requires an implementation science approach that is mindful of agency enablers and barriers to better casework practice, champions at all levels of the organization, and an ongoing commitment to practice. We help agencies with strategies and approaches that support practice shifts that promote family maintenance and foster care prevention. Strategies for accomplishing this include mutual goal mapping. MI trains professionals to listen more than dictate, and guides them to amplify families' own motivations.

Our curriculum promotes participants’ understanding of why families often do not engage in services, including historical experiences with child welfare and other systems. We discuss racial equity, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging cultural strengths and adopting trauma-informed principles such as partnership and voice and respect for client autonomy and self-efficacy.

This curriculum also builds support for the child welfare workforce through three strategies: supporting their self-regulation so they understand their own arousal when working with distressed families and can better work with families with trauma experiences; equipping them with strategies to engage families so that they improve interactions and see improved outcomes; and providing supervisor training so that workers experience better support. This combination of strategies provides promise for improving the chronic problem of worker burnout and turnover, which in turn improves service delivery.

This multidimensional approach to building skills for child welfare organizations places an emphasis on compassionate, strengths-based strategies that address issues of equity, justice, and meeting the needs of families that address their own motivations and goals. This approach not only supports a more holistic vision of addressing family well-being, but also aligns with broader policy frameworks, thereby aiming for transformative impacts on service delivery.

MI is in alignment with the federal Family First legislation which mandates evidence-based programs aimed at preventing foster care placement. We offer fidelity checking and other supports for demonstrating adherence to federal requirements.

Motivational Interviewing is a client-centered approach designed to foster meaningful conversations about change. Through this technique, professionals are equipped to skillfully draw out and reinforce a client's own reasons for change. Evidence consistently indicates that when clients verbalize their motivations for transformation, they are more inclined to follow through. However, the power of Motivational Interviewing extends beyond mere conversation. Studies emphasize the profound impact of the relationship between the practitioner and client on the success of the outcomes. In essence, Motivational Interviewing cultivates a deeply relational and connected dialogue that empowers clients to actualize positive changes in their lives.