In mid 1998, Jim Rast and John VanDenBerg began a series of conversations about their mutual concerns and visions relating to the rapid growth of systems of care and the wraparound process. Their visions saw communities coming together to support all children and families. Their concerns focused on the lack of advanced training, process evaluation and quality control, and research to support quality systems of care and wraparound processes. In the training area, although there were dozens of consultants on systems of care, few were doing the more advanced training that the field was requesting. In quality control, there was little organized assessment of the outcomes variables and even less of process. In research, the group of initial studies had not been followed by controlled studies, although anecdotal evidence about systems of care and the wraparound process was accumulating rapidly.  Read the history of wraparound.

The initial conversations led Jim and John to develop a set of continuous quality improvement (CQI) tools which have now been extensively tested and used in the US and Canada. Then, Jim and John collaborated on development of a series of advanced national and site-level workshops on "201"to "601" level topics ranging from supervision within a system of care to child welfare applications of the wraparound process. To practice approaches for using evaluation to build a system of care, Jim and John have brought these and other advanced efforts together into a large international human services training, evaluation, research, publishing, and consultation firm named Vroon VanDenBerg, LLP (VVDB).