1 THE FAMILIES AND DEMOCRACY PROJECT

The Families and Democracy Project moves family therapists and other professionals into the community via a critique of traditional provider/consumer models of family services, a set of principles about the civic engagement of families in partnership with professionals, and a set of public practices for working on community problems. We describe the Families and Democracy model and three specific projects. We distinguish the model from traditional hierarchical and collaborative models of working with families. And we discuss lessons we have learned so far and our plans to take this work to its next developmental stage. From its beginnings, family therapy has been more than a treatment modality or a theory of human functioning in families. Its proponents have boldly asserted the power of viewing people not as psychological soloists but as chorus dancers in a complex family choreography played out on the larger stage of human social life and other ecological systems. Leaders as different as Bateson (1972), Bowen (1976), Auerswald (1968) and Minuchin and his colleagues (1967) tried to understand the larger world that families live in and sought to make a difference in that world. Subsequent pioneers extended this vision of a better world through the lenses o