The Center for Family Based Training is dedicated to training individuals, groups, and agencies in the principles and practices of a strength-focused, evidence-informed, ecosystemic approach to treating youth and their families. Although our training programs focus on youth receiving services across the continuum of care, we specialize in training professionals working with complex high-risk youth and their families.
We provide a diverse range of training programs, workshops, and seminars designed to empower clinicians and supervisors with essential skills for assessing and effectively addressing family dynamics, communication challenges, and relational conflicts. Our training resources encompass intensive one-year to three-year programs, as well as on-demand and live-streamed continuing education activities. We also engage in ongoing collaboration with behavioral health agencies, hospitals, and schools to offer CE activities, case consultation, supervision, and program development.
The teaching faculty at the Center for Family Based Training are seasoned family therapists with extensive experience in community-based environments. They possess firsthand knowledge of the challenges therapists encounter in their practice. Dr. Wayne Jones, the founder of the Center, along with three senior faculty members, began their careers as family therapists and trainers at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center (PCGC), internationally recognized for its innovative systemic approach to treating children and adolescents developed by Dr. Salvador Minuchin. Additionally, five of our faculty members have worked in Pennsylvania’s or North Carolina’s intensive in-home program serving as front-line therapists and as clinical supervisors.
The Center for Family Based Training reflects the enthusiastic, creative, and engaging teaching style for which PCGC’s family therapy training center was renowned. This reputation has established it as a leader in exceptional family therapy training. The faculty are recognized for their ability to deliver clinical teaching that is both comprehensible and impactful, presenting complex concepts in an accessible manner.
Our training is grounded in the empirically-supported treatment approach known as EcoSystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT), which draws inspiration from Salvador Minuchin’s Structural Model of Family Therapy developed at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center in the early 1970s. ESFT posits that a child’s functioning is best understood and addressed within the framework of family and community relationships.