Center For Family Connections

Creating and Cultivating Connections

At a fundamental level, our mission at Center For Family Connections (CFFC) is to help children feel safe, seen, and valued, and to adjust to the challenges of being, or having been, moved from one family to another. Many of the children we serve have spent years in countless foster homes, orphanages, residential centers, or hospitals. The agency's experienced clinicians understand the interactions and needs of complex blended families, and provide the skills, tools, and talent required to build stronger and healthier family units.

Center For Family Connections is an educational and clinical resource center that specializes in the developmental, structural, and systemic issues related to adoption, foster care, kinship, guardianship, as well as the people with whom they are connected, by offering training, education, advocacy, and clinical treatment.

We believe that the need to honor connections is an essential part of family life.

CFFC is the only free-standing resource committed to serving families and children whose whole lives are touched by adoption, foster care, divorce, and other complex family issues. As adoptions increase and our nation restructures the welfare system, there is an increasing need to provide education, training, and clinical resources to families and professionals.

CFFC is comprised of a team. Each team has members who are both experts in their field and have a commitment to working with families that are blended and complex in nature. These families include adoptive, foster, kinship adoption, guardianship and step families as well as single parent, gay and lesbian families and families formed by donor insemination, surrogacy, and other reproductive technologies. Each form of complex blended family faces unique challenges and developmental issues. In adoption alone, there are many very different issues depending on whether the adoption is domestic, international, infant, older child, sibling set, transracial, kinship (in- family) or foster adopt. These are usual families with unusual challenges.

Cambridge, Massachusetts has been the home of our core team for 20 years and also serves as our central office. Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is the Founder, President, and CEO of CFFC.

CFFC is a non-profit organization that honors diveristy on our team, which reflects the population that we serve. Dr. Pavao has been developing models for treatment and training for over 25 years. Her models emphasize the importance of training and larger system consultation to all who live and work in this world of blended families. Dr. Pavao's models also look at adoption and related families in a non-pathologizing framework with brief/long-term therapy that meets the needs of families at different developmental stages in a positive and healthy manner. CFFC works with judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, teachers, clergy, journalists and other media experts as well as legislators and policy makers.

What Brings People to CFFC?

Untimely pregnancy, infertility, considering adoption, a decision to be a single parent, gay and lesbian parenting concerns, considering DI or other reproductive technologies, step-parenting, foster/adopt, kinship adoption preparation, guardianship, AIDS and stand-by guardianship, 'telling' the child about adoption and other difficult and complex realities in a family, school related problems, workshops for schools, churches, community groups, adolescent concerns, identity issues, search issues for all members of the triad, post search adjustment, mediation and discussion in contested adoptions and custody cases, open adoption agreements, supervised visits, extended family issues, educating grandparents and other relatives...basically, all of the lifelong issues in complex families. Our approach is intergenerational.

What We do At CFFC

Consultation (live or by phone): For adoptive (pre and post) families (including birth families) and other blended families to clarify issues and identify options and resources. For clinicians working with complex families who need guidance with special issues (i.e. disruption, adolescent issues, search, openness, etc.).

Therapy: For individuals, couples, amd families where adoption is part of the picture (including step, foster, guardianship, and kinship issues of emotional adoption).

Groups: For adopted people, birth parents, adoptive parents, post search, art therapy for latency age kids, psychodrama for adolescents, dream groups, narrative groups, foster/adopt, guardian, and extended family/kinship placement groups.

Training and Case Consultation: For therapists, private and public agencies, hospitals, residential treatment centers, lawyers, judges, educators, clergy and others who work with the complex family system.

Community Consultation and Education: For educating community resources such as local groups, clinics, schools, and agencies through workshops, seminars, and conferences. The community in which a person lives has a significant effect upon the quality of family and individual life. Through consultation and education programs, CFFC functions as an aid in preventing certain kinds of conflicts and misunderstandings and serves to provide a larger holding environment for the family and individual.

If you would like more information about CFFC, wish to make a referral, or are in need of a consultation, please call our main number (617)547-0909 or email cffc@kinnect.org; Also, Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao provides summer intensive trainings, year-long intern and extern trainings, and consultation in Cambridge as well as brief intensive trainings and consultations in New York.

Check out CFFC's 2007/2008 Groups and Trainings!