Wraparound Blog

Tribute to Karl W. Dennis, “The Father of Wraparound”

July 10, 2025 | NWI

This tribute is a guest post authored by Ira Lourie.

Karl W. Dennis

Karl Dennis, known as the “Father of Wraparound,” passed away on Friday June 20, 2025, after a long illness. He was 88 years old. I first met Karl in 1973 when he invited me to a conference in Chicago, but he did not get connected to the System of Care world until 1986 when we invited him to come to our first-year review meeting for CASSP, the forerunner of the System of Care Grants.

Karl was the heart and soul of this thing we call “Wraparound.” It began in the early 1970’s at a new agency for troubled kids in Chicago called Kaleidoscope. Karl was hired as Kaleidoscope’s first Executive Director in 1973 – a position he held for 27 years until his retirement in 2002. For the rest of his life, he roamed the United States and the World teaching about Unconditional Care and Wraparound. Kaleidoscope was a unique agency that was created based on an unusual philosophy of truly Unconditional Care – the trademark of which was “No Reject, No Eject”; in other words, they took any kid that was referred to them and wouldn’t kick them out regardless of their behavior. This wasn’t Wraparound as we know it today – that emerged about 20 years later. At first it was just plain Unconditional Care… caring for the kids whose lives they were caring for as if they were their own and building on the strengths of those young people and their families.

I once visited Karl at Kaleidoscope, and was placed in his office while I was waiting for him. This was a long time after the current practice of Wraparound had emerged, around the turn of the century. As I waited, I took time to look through the Kaleidoscope training manual, where I was amazed that the term Wraparound could not be found. Karl helped formulate the practice of Wraparound with other Wrap originators, such as John VanDenBerg and John Burchard, and was one of the earliest Wraparound trainers. He went to communities with emerging systems of care and gave direct family consultations in a Wraparound format, but never ran his agency that way. They practiced all the elements that now define Wraparound, but without calling it that – they called it Unconditional Care.

Karl and his wife Kathy were the Dynamic Duo of Wraparound. As one individual announced at a recent meeting, “Karl told us what to do, and Kathy told us how to do it!” She was hired at Kaleidoscope in 1990 as their new Development Officer and quickly worked her way into Karl’s heart, leading to their marriage 28 years ago in 1996. Over their years together, she and Karl worked closely together both at Kaleidoscope and after, expanding the Unconditional Care philosophy into the Wraparound modality. Kathy became Karl’s constant partner in his Wraparound training and his support of the parent movement.

Karl was an unbelievable storyteller. His Wraparound training sessions, lectures, etc., were all based on his stories of the children, youth and families he worked with over the years at Kaleidoscope. You all know those stories, or at least you should: Tyrone and Carol, the substance users who had lost their children to the social services system but whom Karl found were “great with children” and found a way to let their children get the best of their parents, with Tyrone ending up on the Kaleidoscope board of directors. Cindy, the homeless prostitute with AIDS, whom Karl reconnected to her AIDS baby. Alex, who had been thrown out of jail because he had torn an oak and steel door off of its hinges, returned home to his mother as his post jail placement. Bright, legally-blind Marcus paired up in an apartment with a not-so-bright roommate who could see, ending up with Marcus driving a car down the block into parked cars.

In 1994, I asked Karl if I could use one his stories in a monograph I was writing. Luckily, he agreed, giving me the honor “If anybody ever writes up my stories, it will be you!” So, we got a grant from the Casey Foundation to write a book and a pre-publication promise from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) to buy a lot of them. Which led to our co-authored book about Wraparound based on Karl’s stories, Everything is Normal Until Proven Otherwise; A Book About Wraparound, which was published in 2006. To tell you something about Karl’s giving nature, I wanted the book to be titled something related to one of Karl’s stories, but he insisted that it should be named after something that he liked of mine, Lourie’s First Law of Adolescence.

Karl was involved with the transition of Unconditional Care into formal Wraparound in the mid-1980’s, along with John VanDenBerg and John Burchard. Karl would be upset if I didn’t tell you that a major disappointment in his life was when, around 2004, the Wraparound folks removed the concept of Unconditional Care from Wraparound, replacing it with Persistence. After all, Wraparound was developed on a base of Unconditional Care, Karl would say – how could it be Wraparound without it. This, what Karl saw as a diminution of the power of Wraparound, led in 2023 to us publishing a second edition of Everything is Normal Until Proven Otherwise, this time calling it A Book About Unconditional Care and Wraparound. (Unconditional was put back into the National Wraparound Initiative’s Wraparound Principles around 2008.)

Karl believed strongly in the strengths of families and the important role that parents had to play in the care of their children. He was so invested in supporting families that he shined as a favorite of the families of troubled children (who Karl referred to as being Seriously Emotionally Unique). He traveled the country giving the developing network of parent organizations free trainings and consultations on how to work with their children. He believed that the parent movement was, along with Unconditional Care, a most important aspect of caring for children with troubles.

The national Federation of Families for Child Mental Health gave their major professional award to Karl and then named it after him. Karl bonded with those parents and their state, local and national organizations. He believed strongly that parents were the key to understanding the special needs of their children and were vital in their care; such as in the case of Tyrone and Carol where, while they were not fully able to be the primary caretakers, Karl recognized their important role in the lives of their children. In his story about Alex and his mother (to whom we gave a name, Shirley, in the 2nd Edition), Karl led her as she developed the intervention approach needed to keep Alex at home. Karl supported parent groups at all levels throughout his career, and as I look at the list of his mourners, I believe parents might outnumber professionals. Three of his closest friends from the system of care days up until to his death were parents: Sue Smith, Patty Derr, and Dixie Jordan.

Karl was an open advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual diversity rights, among others. He came from a mixed genetic background that basically included everybody. He was extremely proud of the Native American part of his heritage and thrived on Native philosophies and culture, and especially art. Those who had the opportunity to visit Karl and Kathy’s home could feel that in their décor. He was the most inclusive person I’ve ever met. Karl was part of the small group that came together to define the extremely broad concept of Cultural Competence for the Child and Adolescent Service System Program (CASSP), which later became the System of Care grant program.

Karl had a unique understanding of human nature and could almost instantly bond with anybody. Even in his first encounters with people who were experiencing problems, he had a unique ability to make jokes about what was going on with them without offending them – using those jokes to bond with them. A great example of this was with Cindy, who I mentioned before, the mother of the AIDS baby, a woman with AIDS who had been living on the street and had been prostituting herself in order to exist and who accepted Karl’s invitation for her to see her baby which had been taken from her by the state. When Cindy and Karl first met in the halls of Kaleidoscope, she had an odor and whispered to him an offer to give him some sexual favors. Karl’s response was, “We need to get you a bath and some teeth in your mouth before we can even talk about that.” After a brief tense moment, she began to laugh and then they laughed together; ultimately she and Karl worked well together and became friends.

Karl never put himself first. I remember well the time we were with a group at some meeting and a large group was getting ready to go to dinner, and the prevailing desire was to go to a well-known barbeque place. Karl was a vegetarian (well, really a pescatarian), and some of us pointed out that this might not be the best dinner choice for Karl as a pescatarian. We began to move toward making a different dinner choice, at which point Karl spoke up and said, “I’m sure they had fish last time I went there. Let’s go.” When we got there, we found that fish was only on the menu on certain other days, but as the rest of us began to struggle with what to do next, Karl quickly announced that he would be fine with just sides. Maybe a better story about Karl’s selflessness and humor was one in which Ira, a short Jewish-looking Jew, and Karl, a tall black man, were walking together down the streets of Sandpoint, Idaho, which was famously known for being the home of the Skinheads. Karl looked at me and said, “If they hassle you, tell ’em you’re with me!”

We all loved Karl, and he loved us all back. Karl taught us humility and tolerance, inclusion and support, and Karl taught us to look for the best parts in everyone. He taught us to be better people as we tried to emulate his ideals. Knowing Karl made me a better person, and I think that is probably true for all of us who knew him, interacted with him, and loved him.

There are thousands of reasons to bless Karl and miss him, and I’ve only touched a few… Thank you Buddy, we Love you and miss you so much.