“My ‘aha,’” Ms. Smyth recalled, “was that I saw that what is driving cycles of poverty, violence and trauma is, in part, that we focus on short-term fixes that undermine people’s long-term well-being. And what I mean by well-being is the set of needs and experiences everybody shares for health and hope. In order to get short-term forward movement on a problem, we ask the people who have the fewest well-being assets to give up some of them.”
Photo courtesy of the New York Times

The work of The Full Frame Initiative is featured extensively in a New York Times article entitled When Social Services Undermine Well-being (1/16/19).

Founder and CEO Katya Fels Smyth is interviewed in the article, and explains how The Full Frame Initiative is partnering with social service agencies to use their framework to use a more holistic lens to integrate services and help the people receiving them to achieve “well-being.”

From the article:

“My ‘aha,’” Ms. Smyth recalled, “was that I saw that what is driving cycles of poverty, violence and trauma is, in part, that we focus on short-term fixes that undermine people’s long-term well-being. And what I mean by well-being is the set of needs and experiences everybody shares for health and hope. In order to get short-term forward movement on a problem, we ask the people who have the fewest well-being assets to give up some of them.”

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the article.