What are strengths based practices all about?

Strengths Based Practices (SBPs) concentrates on the inherent strengths of individuals, families groups and organisations deploying peoples' personal strengths to aid their recovery and empowerment. SBPs are empowering alternatives to traditional methods with individuals, group or organizational work. SBPs refrain from allowing crippling, labeling and stigmatized language. Descriptions and pathology owned by persons groups and organizations that suggest acceptance of their condition as hopeless or helpless to change are constructively challenged through SBPs. Strengths based strategies build and foster hope from within by focusing and working with precedent successes. SBPs strategies facilitate change by assisting to look at / what has worked? What does not work? And what might work presently making it important for facilitators and those desiring change to be integral to this process of change. This introductory paper provides a bird's eye view of the assumptions, and discuses its core elements.