Paulette Moore Hines AFTA Award

I am profoundly honored to have the opportunity to present an AFTA award to Paulette Moore Hines for her many contributions to our field. For more than twenty years, she has been an inspiration as a teacher, mentor, researcher, and author, especially in relation to families in underserved inner city communities. I doubt there is an African American in our field who has not been influenced by Dr. Hines, through her classic 1982 article on working with African American Families, co-authored by Nancy Boyd Franklin. Revised in 1996, and elaborated on in many other publications, this paper addresses how African American families deal with loss, gender roles, intergenerational relationships, life cycle issues, and socio-cultural stresses. But Dr. Hines' impact on our field goes beyond her clinical work and clinical writing. Throughout her career, she has been trying to design and disseminate culturally based interventions that empower people to not only survive, but to thrive. She is a pioneer in the area of prevention services—services aimed at preventing violence and other social dysfunction to local communities by providing systemic supports at multiple levels—to families, schools, and social service personnel. Her work goes far beyond the therapy room to larger systems interventions concerned with improving mental health outcomes through policy, administrative and staff practices, as well as interventions for families struggling on an everyday basis.

Dr. Hines has tried to see to it that we give more than honorable mention to the reality that our work as researchers and practitioners is not free of cultural bias. She has tried to identify and encourage strategies to foster open dialogue, critique, expanded self awareness, respectful curiosity about others, acknowledgment of what we don't know, and mutual learning between staff and the families and communities with whom we work, so that this knowledge informs our practice at every critical juncture. During her childhood, Dr. Hines' grandfather, a Baptist minister, often said to her, "Never say you can't." Well, she was obviously listening.

She never does say can't. And, as she has put it, "It's not about being grandiose. It's about keeping on keeping on." She often quotes the expression: "When life knocks you down, land on your back, because if you can look up, you can get up." This expression is typical of the humor and the perseverance with which Paulette lives her life and helps the rest of us to as well.

And she is tireless. She recently sent me an email at 5:30 am, after we had spent the entire previous evening in conversation over a difficult relationship we were having with a colleague. Overnight she had more thoughts and wanted to leave no stone unturned in our understanding of the situation and efforts to solve our relationship problem. As she says, "We should use the unique gifts that God has given each of us," and that is what she does every day, and what she inspires others to do.

Currently, Dr Hines is Director of the Office of Prevention Services and Research, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—University Behavioral HealthCare, where she is also Clinical Assistant Professor in the Psychiatry Department of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She is also on the faculty of the Multicultural Family Institute in Highland Park, New Jersey, and has a private practice in South Brunswick, New Jersey.

Dr. Hines spent her Internship year (1976—77) at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. It was then that I had the good fortune to meet her, and we have worked together ever since. She married her college sweetheart and they have two sons. Their older son graduated from college last year and the younger is just finishing his first year of college this year. I have known Dr. Hines for twenty-five years now, first as my student, later as my teacher, and along the way as colleague and deeply valued friend and life-mate (by that I mean someone I expect to know and call on for all of my life. And that is a tremendous reassurance and comfort to me). She is a person of deepest integrity, thoughtfulness, spirituality, generosity, humor, intelligence and soul. She is a loving wife, a devoted mother to her two sons, committed to her family—her parents, her cousins, and her cousins' cousins, and all her extended family, as well as regularly keeping in touch with innumerable friends and colleagues. All these commitments are part of her larger commitment—to her community and to making a better world for us all. Her work is and has always been about her commitment to community. She is tireless in her efforts to help her people and to courageously fighting to make changes so that everyone will have a chance to thrive in our society. She has always believed that family therapy is a necessary but not sufficient response in the scheme of things. She believes in not waiting for people to "fall off the side of the mountain" but trying to develop proactive strategies at every level to empower them

Her work is focused on Building minority leadership and developing cultural proficiency among all prevention practitioners and researchers Expanding our knowledge about the role of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigrant status, and the larger community context in prevention of violence, substance abuse and other problems.

Devoted to developing and evaluating culturally sensitive preventive interventions and programs, Dr. Hines has been involved in a wide range of research projects over the years, but the thread unifying all her work is her driving desire to improve the lives of youth and families in our disadvantaged communities. She is dedicated and committed to the subjects of her studies and to the staff she supports in a way that I have rarely known in my life. Indeed, one of her earliest mentees, Reverend Deniece Reid, MSW, was the recipient of an AFTA award two years ago for her creative systemic-community work within her church community in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Dr. Hines was born in North Carolina and studied Psychology and Sociology at North Carolina Central University in Durham, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1974. She received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Delaware in 1978. In her dissertation she investigated the self-esteem in Black and White adolescents. Dating back as far as 1978, while still in graduate school, she published a paper on ethical concerns in family therapy with Rachel Hare-Mustin, and another with Linda Berg-Cross that analyzed ethnic differences in self-esteem.

Over the past twenty-five years she has accomplished an amazing amount in terms of research and training grants to help those in need, generating more than ten million dollars in research grants. She and her coworkers have built partnerships with educators, service providers, faith-based institutions, and juvenile justice, as well as clinic settings to improve the mental health and quality of life for underserved and highly vulnerable populations. She has for many years developed ground-breaking grants to promote work on these issues. The programs she has developed include those described below.

NEW JERSEY YOUTH CORPS is a program for high school dropouts aged sixteen to twenty-five. This program offers comprehensive services to promote employability and personal success to young adults who are at high risk for life difficulties. An average 100 youth participate each year, providing more than 15,000 hours of community service to youth agencies.

The program was visited by President Clinton in 1994, having won the Model Program Designation and received the National Diffusion Award from the US Department of Education.

SANKOFA, developed with her colleague Charlee Sutton, is a culture-based youth violence prevention program based on African American principles. The program was recently awarded $ 1 million to assess the long-term outcomes of the model. SANKOFA is named for an African bird that has become an important symbol for many African Americans, because it flies forward while looking backward. SANKOFA incorporates appreciation of cultural knowledge and history with concrete training for current realities. It teaches young people about their history, emphasizing seven C's. It draws on their consciousness of their traditional resources, their commitment to community, their creativity and courage in managing conflict, and their ability to manage risky situations, conducting themselves in competent, responsible ways.

The program, which involves training for adolescents, parents, and schools in the community, focuses on instilling in youth a clear sense of personal values and life goals, increasing their awareness of the relationship between everyday choices and their potential for realizing hopes and dreams in the future.

PEACEKEEPERS, involves training and empowering community members to serve as resources in schools and community based organizations. It provides technical assistance to organizations that wish to recruit, train or supervise conflict intervention teams at school and community-based sites.

MAKING BETTER CHOICES ,supported by a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Health, focuses on training for adolescents and parents around three problems that disproportionately affect minority youth: youth violence, unwanted teenage pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Dr. Hines' team has collected data from over 1,400 urban youth who have participated in this process.

HART (Healing and Recovery After Trauma) targets youth who have witnessed violence against family or friends or been direct victims of a violent crime. The program provides education and training to parents and service providers who must manage their own and their children's reactions to violent events.

Though Dr. Hines is best known in AFTA circles for the many papers she has written on African American families, she has also presented and written extensively on the community projects she has developed, especially the programs for preventing youth violence. Her classic paper on African American families with Nancy Boyd Franklin, as mentioned already, has had a tremendous impact on the field. She has in addition written papers on the family life cycle of poor Black families (1989, 1999), mourning rituals (1986), multi-impact family therapy with multiproblem families (1989), African American women (1989), African American mothers (1990), loss in African American families (1991), intergenerational relationships in African American families (1992), and "Keeping Hope Alive (1998), which discusses strategies African Americans have developed over the centuries to maintain their will to survive and to transform the horrendous circumstances to which they have been subjected for hundreds of years in this country. This paper is an inspirational beacon to those wanting to empower families struggling with the residuals of slavery and racism. It is a powerful, creative reminder of the adaptive strategies African Americans have developed to survive and to transform their lives.

Dr. Hines has spoken and written a great deal over the years about the skepticism with which people in her culture view therapy and she has tried to help stretch our field to bridge this gap—to help us appreciate the richness of healing stories, prayers, songs, and poetry of her culture, and to appreciate that there are many other forums in which one can do therapeutic and healing work beyond the therapy context as we have defined it. In speaking of her dreams of what she hopes still to do (besides sitting under a coconut tree watching waves at the beach!), she said she dreams of finding more effective ways to translate research into systems interventions and practices that go way beyond the therapy room—transforming our institutions, our communities and ultimately our society.

On a personal note, I want to acknowledge the ways Paulette has lived out her beliefs with all who know her. There's no one you'd rather have in your corner when you are at the most complex, difficult, trying moments of your life than Paulette Moore Hines. She has the most amazing ability to keep her feet on the ground and her heart open to others' needs, personal stress and pain, while staying focused on the task at hand. She can remain diplomatic, strategic and loving in the tightest, most polarized discussion, while not ever retreating from the hard realities that need to be addressed. Her ability to maintain and spread hope has been a deep inspiration to me for all the twenty-five years that I have known her. And it is great to be on her email list to get the inspirational stories and jokes she sends to her friends.

After all she has done to deserve an AFTA award, I hope you will join me in celebrating Paulette Moore Hines for her achievements. I do want to say that I hope in the future those who follow in Dr. Hine's footsteps will not be receiving special diversity awards, but rather will be appreciated as deserving general AFTA awards for the contribution they have made through work that concerns all of us. I have considerable ambivalence about the nature of these awards. For us to reward those whose work relates to families marginalized by our society is extremely important, but for us to have "regular" awards and then "diversity" awards, may continue to marginalize those therapists and researchers who have from the beginning been marginalized by our field, even as we attempt to celebrate them. I hope that there will come a time when the notion of a "diversity award" will seem peculiar to us all, because we will be taking "diversity" into account in all that we do.

Our "regular" awards will naturally celebrate work related to everyone in our society. In the meantime, please help me in celebrating the work of one of our most courageous, committed, hardworking and innovative members: Paulette Moore Hines.

Monica McGoldrick, MSW, PhD (h.c.), is Director of the Multicultural Family Institute in Highland Park, NJ. She is on the faculty of Fordham University School for Social Service and the Psychiatry Department at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She is a Charter Member of AFTA and has served as an officer, board member, Program Chair, as well as on many committees over the past 20 years.