What does every family leader want? A smooth-running household that works as a team, communicates well and enjoys their time together. Sounds nice right? It sounds like an episode of a sappy sitcom that gives you unrealistic expectations of what family life can be. The same holds true for promises about family meetings. Not easy unless scripted by a sitcom writer. The reality is that families are made up of individuals all going through personal highs and lows, and resulting in personal priorities and their own agendas. That means building a tight-knit and healthy family takes as much work as building and running a small business. Although she has lots of professional credentials, Katherine Gordy Levine offers a unique and practical perspective on parenting. For nearly fourteen years, she and her husband left their professional lives behind to become Special Need Foster Parents. They offered short term care for teens in trouble with the law. By the time they stopped being foster parents, 366 youths had lived with us as members of our family.Her professional credentials? A social worker with a Master's Degree from Bryn Mawr; a licensed therapist; a retired professor having taught at Columbia University's School of Social Work for almost fifty years. Finally, before retiring in 2010, she directed mental health mobile crisis and family support teams in New York City's poverty-South Bronx. She is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on trauma, mental health crisis care for families and children. Her expertise in Family Meetings developed as she directed a federally funded project designed to include family voices in planning mental health treatment or suicidal children. When attending such meetings, Katherine realized family voices were still not being heard? Why? Families needed training in both running family meetings and speaking up at meetings with others. This book details what she learned while teaching families to speak at all meetings. She may not know everything thing, but she knows lots about holding a successful meeting and particularly a successful family meeting.