Bringing the Greenbook to Life: A Resource Guide for Communities - Promising Futures

Bringing the Greenbook to Life: A Resource Guide for Communities (Guide) is designed for communities seeking to develop interventions that will improve their responses to families suffering both domestic violence and child maltreatment. The Greenbook, a publication released in 1999 by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and formally entitled Effective Interventions in Domestic Violence & Child maltreatment Cases: Guidelines for Policy and Practice, explored the links between domestic violence and child abuse and neglect, and promoted collaboration among child welfare systems, domestic violence advocates, and dependency courts in order to serve battered mothers and their children more effectively. In order to create a laboratory for the implementation of the Greenbook’s philosophy and guidelines, in 2001 the federal government funded six communities to evolve blueprints for putting the Greenbook into practice. Through the implementation process, these communities learned about trust-building, collaboration, and
systems change. They developed strategies, policies, and protocols to drive the changes they envisioned. They struggled with issues of community, cultural difference, and power. These communities amassed a wealth of information and experience about how to operationalize the Greenbook, wealth which it is the intention of this Guide to share with other communities that understand the principles of the Greenbook and now want to know how to make those principles a reality. The Guide explores a number of the major policy and practice issues confronted by the communities that have implemented the Greenbook; details the various ways in which the communities have attempted to address these issues; and, where protocols, tools, and exercises exist, includes them, along with commentary on using them successfully. The idea is to enable communities to begin the process of change without having to “reinvent the wheel.”