When Home Isn’t Safe Anymore: Rethinking Intensive Family Support

What happens when families have accessed every available service, but still need more support to keep their children safe and their families together?

This important question was at the heart of a recent presentation by ACMH’s Dianna Robinson, Director of Operations, and Angie Engler, Interim Parent Support Partner Statewide Coordinator, titled When Home Isn’t Safe Anymore: Redesigning Intensive Family Support.

The session explored what we call “The Missing Middle”—the gap between traditional outpatient and community-based services and out-of-home placement. For many families navigating complex behavioral and mental health challenges, existing services may not provide the intensity, flexibility, or sustained support needed to stabilize the entire family before a crisis escalates.

Rather than focusing solely on the challenges, participants were invited to imagine what meaningful family stabilization could look like.

Through facilitated small-group conversations, participants explored three critical questions:

• What would families actually need beyond traditional clinical treatment?
• What would systems need to do differently to better support families?
• What would intervention look like if family preservation, rather than crisis reaction, were the goal?

These conversations are helping inform a broader exploration of practical, relational, whole-family approaches that support families before crisis becomes collapse.

The Conversation Doesn’t End Here

ACMH has launched a dedicated webpage to share presentation materials, practical resources, emerging ideas, and insights from these important conversations.

We invite families, advocates, professionals, community partners, and system leaders to explore the resources and continue thinking about what it would take to build the support families need.

Explore the Missing Middle and access presentation resources:

https://www.acmh-mi.org/when-home-isnt-safe-anymore/

Before collapse. Before separation. Before another system becomes involved. What would it take to help families keep standing?