Efforts to incorporate social justice perspectives into a family training program

This paper describes the efforts of the faculty of the Family Institute of New Jersey in recent years to develop a collaborative family training progr am that takes into account issues of gender, race, culture, class and sexua l orientation. We have come to realize how strongly traditional approaches have been skewed in the direction of the dominant culture-white, male, hete rosexist, and prioritizing the needs and experience of the middle and upper classes. We have attempted to modify our teaching, supervision, reading li sts, and overall training approach to challenge trainees and ourselves to m ove toward broader, strength-based and equity-based multicultural perspecti ves in our training. We describe our vision, how we incorporate it into our program structure, and a few of our training initiatives.