To discuss ways to help strengthen family systems was the purpose of a Wingspread Conference held in Racine, Wisconsin. The conference was sponsored by the Coalition for the White House Conference on Families, in cooperation with the Johnson Foundation. There are ten sections to the report, including a brief introduction which provides background information on the conference. Section two, "The State of the Family," presents statistics to show how the family is changing. Section three, "What Sort of Help Does the Family Need?" discusses the danger of having a family policy and the role of service professionals. "The Difficulty of Being Specific about Family Policy" is dealt with in the fourth section. As soon as deliberations become specific, a variety of constituencies with a variety of agendas soon discover that they may agree only in the general concern for the family. Sections five through eight describe various support systems to the family, including self-help, neighborhoods, religion, and ethnicity. Families do not live and function as isolated units, but have informal and complex relations with several networks that provide support and sustenance. Section nine deals with family policy considerations. Whether or not federal policy is too crude and clumsy an instrument for dealing with the diversity of families and their variety of needs is discussed. The concluding section provides an overview of what was accomplished at the conference. A list of conference participants is provided. (RM)