I think about it a little differently, so I say, "What if I don't have a program?" What if we don't start with the fact that it';s kind of like if you're a mental health intervention person and you don't have a program, well why are you here? Who put you on earth? Why would you want to be a person like that? I think there is something really nice about not having a program because I don't take ownership of it. It's no longer my program, and so now what I'm doing is I'm addressing an issue, a problem, and if we're in a school, and we are talking with a principal or school staff about a particular set of problems they have.

Let's say their playground is out of control, or we'll say that they're very concerned that their parents are not as involved as they need to be, or they haven't figured out a way to link parents in in a way that they like, or their teachers are feeling very stressed. So we can address any of those problems. I still don't have a program. I'm still not bringing them a program. I'm helping them address a problem. What I like about that is that it keeps me in the setting, and it keeps me thinking about that setting. Now if I want to bring them a program because I know there are some very smart people out there and they've developed programs and there might be some really terrific things to do with parents, I'm thinking about them, and I'm thinking about their use of this.

So I'm saying, "Dr. Joe Smith at Harvard has developed this terrific program of working with parents. Let's take a look at it and see what it looks like."

I think what that does is it gets us out of the bind of we need a whole new way of thinking about it. That's the way I've been approaching my work is that I'm immersed in the settings, trying to think from the perspective of these settings what we can do to make things work. In that respect, I'm not thinking about what in addition do we need to do to make these programs work. I'm thinking, "Are these the right programs for this setting?" And if they're not, what do we need to do to address that?