Center for Child & Family Development
The Center for Child & Family Development (CCFD) is the largest, longest running university-schools partnership in School-Based Family Counseling (SBFC) in the USA. School-Based Family Counseling is an integrated approach to mental health intervention that focuses on both school and family in order to help children overcome personal problems and succeed at school. The CCFD played a leadership role in pioneering SBFC in California.
Founded in 1984, the CCFD has served over 30,000 children and families in underserved schools in the Mission district of San Francisco for 40 years. The CCFD also provides supervised training and internship opportunities for individuals training to be licensed therapists.
CCFD is proud to be an integral part of the Western Institute for Social Research–an academic community deeply committed to education for social justice.
The WISR CCFD is committed to the academic, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual development of students and families through teaching, training, research, and direct service (e.g., mental health) programs. CCFD recognizes that students can gain educational curriculum and, thus, whole child success, when a variety of basic needs are met.
The Center provides a very valuable practicum option for those WISR MFT students who wish to gain experience in school-based family counseling in the Bay Area, and an unpaid internship option for recent WISR MFT alums.
Sheena Sattarpour, MA, LMFT is CCFD’s Executive Director, Christine Tippett, LCSW, LMFT is the Clinical Director, Jacqueline Shinefield, RN, EdD is Chair of the Advisory Board.
For more information contact Sheena Sattarpour at: ssattarpour.ccfd@wisr.edu.
WELCOME TO THE CENTER FOR CHILD AND FAMILY DEVELOPMENT
Introduction
The Center takes a unique approach to providing on-site school-based mental health services to students and families. No fees are charged to families, and costs are offset by Title I federal funding.
The Center was co-founded in 1984 by Brian Gerrard, PhD, and Emily Girault, PhD, when both were counseling psychology faculty at the University of San Francisco. During the summer of 2020 the Center moved to the Western Association for Social Research (WISR) in Berkeley, California.
An extraordinary institution of higher learning, WISR embodies the value of diversity, social justice, community involvement, action-oriented assignments, and emphasis on social change in its teaching community and student enrollment.
Its central beliefs are built on the worth and distinctiveness of each student’s background and in support of transformative learning. These components of the WISR mission contribute to whole person success within the School Based Mental Health Child/Family Model of intervention.
The Executive Director for the Center is Sheena Sattarpour, MS, LMFT. She is responsible for overseeing program and clinical development. Individual and group supervisors all hold licenses through the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (BBS) to supervise both marriage and family therapy and professional clinical counseling trainees and associates.
Mission Statement
The Center is committed to the academic, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual development of students and families through teaching, training, research, and direct clinical service programs. The Center recognizes that students can access educational curriculum when mental health needs are met.
The Center honors families and caregivers as integral to student success and pays respect to the fundamental role they play in their child’s life. Through outreach and engagement with families and those in a child’s support system, including teachers and administrators, for example, the Center works towards serving the whole child. A continuum of services through a systems wide approach is a hallmark of our work.
The Center values diversity—racial, ethnic, national, cultural, gender equity, gender identity and sexual orientation, neurological styles, physical and learning differences – in the population it serves. It recruits a cohort of trainees and associates who share this belief. It emphasizes the concepts of cultural humility, sensitivity, and competency.
It emphasizes the concepts of cultural humility, sensitivity, and competency.
The Center holds firm on its social justice perspective, both in theory and application. It believes that the psychotherapeutic process is designed to help children and families seek dignity, self-determination, wellness, and safety through the reduction of oppressive stressors.
The Center utilizes trauma informed, sensitive, and responsive interventions.
In response to the tragedies of those people who have been murdered in the name of hate during 2020 and historically, the Center is passionately recommitting to an anti-racism platform in all aspects of its work with the full participation of its Advisory Board. Active attention will be devoted to staff, the cohort of trainees and associates, and community partners.
Partnerships and Delivery Models
Through a collaboration among the Center, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Unified School District funding is secured through a federal entitlement program, Title I.
All services are delivered in person at the school sites except during the pandemic of Covid-19 resulting in the Center working virtually.
A Training Institute for Professional Development
As the Center focuses on the well-being of students and families, it also offers a comparable view for supporting trainees and associates. It strives to develop and deepen the psychotherapeutic skills of its participants through professional development.
Individual and group supervision, required monthly trainings, and opportunities for independent study—all are included in an array of learning activities. Historically, the Center has emphasized family systems theory as a psychological modality. This orientation remains at the heart of our training, not only for what it means for students and families, but also for what it affords a trainee/associate in becoming skilled in systems work.
Being able to navigate a family system in conjunction with utilizing opportunities of an educational system is a winning combination of skill sets in terms of clinical expertise and future marketability. Case advocacy work abounds in schools.
Added to the fundamental theory and practice of family systems, the Center also encourages the exploration of current best practices for mental health service with children and families.
It accepts trainees and associates at the current phase of their professional development and encourages the exploration of new content and skills.
The Center does not hold a belief that there is one single psychological orientation or modality which is effective for all clients. It values what the trainee or associate brings to the learning experience.
Various forms of developmentally appropriate interventions are used with the pre K-12th grade youth who are served; a trauma informed approach is applied with youth and families in School Based Family Counseling.
Required monthly trainings include a didactic component, process-oriented dialogue, and experiential exercises. The Center supports all types of learning and provides a safe environment for a most profound professional development experience.
Special Facts About the CCFD
- The Center was founded at the University of San Francisco. USF President Fr. John Schlegel once referred to the Center as “the jewel in the crown of the university.”
- In 2020 the Center moved to the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR). WISR President John Bilorusky describes the Center as a program with “a proud and nationally distinctive history of contributing to the education of professional, school-based counselors and to social justice for school children in need. WISR, with its own distinctive history of education for social justice, is extremely fortunate to have partnered with CCFD in continuing on together in our efforts to make a difference in the world.”
- The Center for Child & Family Development (CCFD) was created in 1984 and pioneered School-Based Family Counseling in California.
- It is the largest longest running university-schools partnership of its type in the USA.
- More than 30,000 at-risk children and families have been provided with counseling in over 70 participating Bay area public, Catholic and private schools.
- Since 1984 the Center has had a strong social justice mission evidenced in its commitment to serving the poorest schools in San Francisco. Many of the Center’s clients live in the Mission District – one of the more difficult neighborhoods in which to live in San Francisco. The violent crime rate in the Mission is among the highest in San Francisco and gang activity is a constant concern for the residents. It has the highest concentration of children and is one of the poorest San Francisco neighborhoods.
- The Center has generated more than $1.5 million in grants, donations and fees. In 2003 the Center received a grant of $195K from the Langendorf Foundation to develop a community counseling center. Other foundations supporting the Center have been: The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, The Koret Foundation, The Sharper Image, The Stulsaft Foundation, and Trust Funds incorporated.
- In 1991 the Center opened its Alternative Family Project which served LGBTQ families.
- More than 300 USF graduate students in Counseling Psychology have benefitted from being trainees in the Center.
- Half of the schools that had a Center trainee later hired that trainee as their school mental health professional.
- The Center is co-sponsor of the Oxford Symposium in School-Based Family Counseling, an international conference held yearly at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
- The Center’s book Disastershock: How to Cope with the Emotional Stress of a Major Disaster has been distributed free of charge to communities worldwide affected by disaster: the Covid 19 pandemic (translated into 31 languages), the Parkland Florida school shootings, Houston flood, Santa Rosa fires, Puerto Rico hurricane, and Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Lahore, Manchester, and Egypt terrorist attacks; la Puerta, Mexico earthquake, Guatemala volcano disaster, Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and Chad, and mosque shootings in New Zealand.
- Following the San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake that was responsible for 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries, Center trainees provided extensive counseling for persons affected.
- Distinguished family therapist Cloe Madanes (author of Strategic Family Therapy, Behind the One-Way Mirror, Sex, Love and Violence, The Secret Meaning of Money, and The Violence of Men which have been translated into more than twenty languages) was director of the Center’s Council for the Human Rights of Children from 2002-2012.
- William Glasser, the world-famous psychiatrist, author of Schools without Failure and creator of Reality Therapy and Choice Theory Psychology gave a community workshop for the Center in 2003. In 2005 The Center, together with the Institute for School-Based family Counseling, presented Dr. Glasser with the Award for Outstanding Contribution to School-based Family Counseling.”
- In 2019 the Center became the first organization in San Francisco to receive Title 1 federal funding ($118K) to provide counseling services to poor, at-risk children in Catholic and private schools.
CCFD, WISR Board Members
- Daniel Emina, MD, Amen Clinics, Orange County, California, USA
- Ernest Brown III, PhD, RAMS Outpatient Services, San Francisco, California, USA
- Brian A. Gerrard, PhD, Institute for School Based Family Counseling
- Judy Giampaoli, MA, LMFT, Family Therapist, San Francisco, California, USA
- Maryellen Mullin, MA, LMFT, Family Therapist, San Francisco, California, USA
- Sheena Sattarpour, MA, LMFT, Western Institute for Social Research, Berkeley, California, USA
- Jackie Shinefield, EdD, RN, Family Therapist, New York, New York, USA
- Helen Sung, PhD, School Psychologist, Santa Clara, California, USA
- Christine Tippett, MSW, LCSW, LMFT, Western Institute for Social Research, Berkeley, California, USA