In Kiswahili Rafiki means friend...

Welcome to Rafiki Consortium, a group of mental healthProfessionals professionals specializing in improving interpersonal and intrapersonal communication within human systems. Survival in the twenty-first century requires that communities have an effective and efficient process of working together. Rafiki offers customized interventions to public and private agencies, educational and human service institutions, community networks, and religious institutions that facilitate better working relationships among members of their stakeholder networks.

Rafiki specializes in facilitating cross-cultural communications, that may include assisting stakeholders from differing backgrounds (classes, races, professions, genders, ages, etc.) and with differing perspectives, experience the common ground that is the basis for productive planning that addresses the needs of all involved parties. This consciousness raising consensus building process is based on the assumption that all people have good intentions and given enough support and skillful assistance, will respond positively.

Rafiki’s staff has extensive experience in Psychology; Social Work; Human and Organizational Development; Community Mental Health; and several spiritual disciplines. Rafiki’s associates are highly experienced family and group psychotherapists who have worked in a variety of mental health and human service environments as clinicians, supervisors, managers and trainers.

Philosophy

Rafiki is a Kiswahili word that means "friend".  We see ourselves as friends of the community. 

Our philosophy of service delivery is based on the following assumptions:

  • People are innately good;
  • All people want the best for their families;
  • All people want the best for their communities;
  • Communities are groups of families;
  • Communities know their needs;
  • In a properly functioning system/community everyone has a valuable role to play in meeting those needs;
  • Communities like individuals have inherent strengths that must be tapped;
  • People will work together when provided with a genuine opportunity to do so;   and
  • Empowered families make strong communities.

Rafiki specializes in teaching the facilitation of communication, understanding that families, groups and communities can solve their own problems when provided with the appropriate tools and support. Rafiki sees its mission as the provision of clinical services and training that promotes the healing of negative attitudes, behaviors, thought patterns and emotional states that prevent the delivery of quality service to families and communities. Rafiki promotes skill development, attitudes of service and consciousness of social issues as necessary tools of both professional and indigenous helpers.

Professional Training Services

The Rafiki Consortium has experience providing direct services, supervision and program management in a variety of human service formats.  Rafiki specializes in providing training to professionals, paraprofessionals and community persons; which supports them in being family focused, spiritually based, culturally competent, solution oriented and totally empowering to their service populations.  Rafikis trainings are didactic, experiential and therapeutic for the participants. Rafiki provides training in the following areas:

Motivational Interviewing Stages of Change
Enriched Structural Family Therapy Counseling Skills
Cultural Competency Mediation/Conflict Resolution
Group Dynamics Family Systems
Wrap Around Services Crisis Intervention
Suicide: Assessment & Treatment Substance Abuse Counseling
Stress Management Anger Management
Clinical Supervision Clinical Documentation
Effective Communications Emotional Competence
Parenting & Co-Parenting Brief/Solution-Based Therapy
Burnout Prevention Team Building

Rafiki is known for training professional and paraprofessionals to:

  1. Provide effective collaboration with family systems;
  2. Deliver a competency-based approach to interventions, consultations and trainings;
  3. Skillfully integrate culturally competent concepts and practices into program development and service delivery;
  4. Utilize a set of clinical skills based on ethical and moral concepts; and
  5. Develop both professionally and personally using a parallel training process that focuses on both the transfer of skills and the integration of a self-reflective process for personal growthand maturity.

Methodology

Enriched Structural Family Therapy (ESFT), is the centerpiece of the family management and parenting skills training that Rafiki is offering.  It is a competency based, skills oriented, systems approach to working with families.  ESFT is a highly teachable model which works well,  providing participants with a solution-oriented process for improving family functioning and solving problems. 

The model evolved out of the work of Henry Gregory, Jannette Meriweather Gregory, and Ross Ford.  This model is an enrichment of structural family therapy developed originally in the late 1960's and the early 1970's with minority families in Philadelphia, Baltimore and other urban centers.  The ESFT model is used by many human service agencies in Baltimore and Washington, DC. 

Training is performed in the following manner:

· Training utilizes a competency oriented approach which focuses on the strengths of the individual and the family, thereby promoting feelings of safety and openness in the trainee.

· Training is skills oriented. Training focuses on a parallel process, utilizing the same skills with the trainees that are to be used with their families.  Conceptually, then, trainees will experience these skills as real and beneficial to their own lives before they attempt to influence others with them.   

· Training respects the rights and abilities of individuals to make decisions about their lives, with the aid of a facilitator who helps to clarify communications, options and consequences. 

· Training promotes independence, as it presupposes that everyone has an innate capacity and innate strength that can be focused as a foundation for change. 

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