From principle to practice: what the WINGS networks have built, and what they still need

In 2011, the Third National Guardianship Summit made a recommendation that has quietly reshaped adult protection in the United States: that every state convene a standing partnership between its courts and the people who live with the guardianship system every day. The partnerships were given a name, Working Interdisciplinary Networks of Guardianship Stakeholders, or WINGS. Fifteen years later, the state‑by‑state directory maintained by the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging, which has coordinated the effort with the National Center for State Courts, showed as of June 17, 2026 that WINGS or comparable collaborative bodies had been convened in roughly two dozen states, with activity levels varying by jurisdiction. This article is about what those networks have accomplished, what their own reports identify as still missing, and where a field‑tested operational method could fit.

What a WINGS is. A WINGS brings to one table the actors who, in most states, never sat together: judges and court clerks, Adult Protective Services, the bar and legal aid, the state unit on aging, disability advocates, professional and family guardians, and sometimes banks and hospitals. Its mandate is systemic: not to resolve individual cases but to find where the system fails and to fix it from the inside, through training, forms, data, legislation and monitoring. Nine states launched WINGS between 2013 and 2015 with support from the State Justice Institute. Seven more, Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Oregon and Utah, received federal funding from the Administration for Community Living between 2016 and 2020. Nevada made its WINGS a permanent twenty‑member commission in 2017. Florida's is convened by a law school. Virginia's runs four working groups, on data, resources, monitoring and legislation.

What they have built. The record is real. In Idaho and Indiana, WINGS advanced the legislation on supported decision‑making and less restrictive alternatives that this site's first article described; Indiana's Guardianship Oversight Task Force, convened by the state Supreme Court, put twenty‑six recommendations on the table. In Maryland, the network is implementing twenty‑five recommendations of its own. Across the seven federally funded states, WINGS produced training curricula for judges, lawyers and guardians, plain‑language guides for families, bench cards for the courtroom, complaint forms, monitoring tools, compliance officer positions, court visitor programs and the first mechanisms for collecting data. The Fourth National Guardianship Summit, held in May 2021 under the theme "Maximizing Autonomy and Ensuring Accountability," adopted twenty‑two recommendations, among them an enforceable bill of rights for adults under guardianship, mandatory consideration of supported decision‑making, the replacement of plenary orders by tailored ones, monitoring systems with data standards, licensure or certification of professional guardians, and a federal court improvement program for guardianship modeled on the one that exists for child welfare. Most of these are now the agenda of the state networks.

What they say they still need. The most candid assessment comes from the networks themselves. The federal summary of the WINGS program, published in 2021, lists the obstacles without embellishment: limited data on the prevalence of abuse; inconsistent implementation from one court to another; no sustained funding or institutional support; high judicial turnover and competing caseloads; vulnerability to changes in state leadership and budgets; and, most tellingly, the need for "measures of impact on the lives of adults" rather than measures of process. A WINGS can report the number of trainings delivered and guides published. It cannot yet report whether the adults under guardianship in its state are better protected, because the files that would show it are not built to be compared.

The research record has said the same thing for almost twenty years. In 2007, the first national study of public guardianship, conducted by Pamela Teaster, Erica Wood and colleagues with statutory analysis in forty‑four states and site visits in seven jurisdictions, concluded that "very little data exists on public guardianship," that programs were "frequently significantly understaffed and underfunded," that oversight was "uneven," and that actual caseloads, 84 protected persons per deputy public guardian in Los Angeles at the time, were several times the recommended ratio of one to twenty. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office titled its report on the subject The Extent of Abuse by Guardians Is Unknown. And in 2022, a literature review funded by the National Institute of Justice, again with Wood among its authors, found that "federal inquiries and a limited amount of research have been unable to determine the scope and prevalence of abuse by guardians," and that courts need "consistent and timely data and a comprehensive case management system to record, retrieve, and update" information across the life of each case.

A 2024 study in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy measured that gap precisely. Its authors examined the annual report forms that guardians must file in forty‑three jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, coded against the National Guardianship Association's standards of practice. Only 40 percent of the forms collect any information on the protected person's goals, needs and preferences. Seven percent ask about the guardian's caseload. Nine percent ask about the guardian's training. The forms range "from one page with just a few general questions to 20 pages with detailed multiple‑part questions," and 65 percent are written above an eighth‑grade reading level, for a population of guardians who are, in an estimated 85 percent of cases, family members or friends without legal training. The conclusion is the one the networks reached on their own: better reporting procedures would let courts monitor more effectively, protect rights more reliably, and finally produce meaningful data on the state of guardianship.

Read together, these findings point to a missing operational layer: a common way of working cases that can generate comparable, reviewable records across professions and courts. The networks have produced principles, training, tools and institutional structure. What the data show is that the files those structures receive are not yet built to be read, compared or measured.

Where a field method fits. The LAPA Methodology was developed in France across more than 230 court‑supervised cases, in a system where every measure is judicially supervised, proportionality is a legal duty and accounts are rendered to the court as a matter of course. It is not a legal framework and does not propose one; guardianship in the United States is state law and will remain so. It is an operational method, and it answers three of the needs the networks and the research have named.

The first is a shared structure across professions. A WINGS exists to break silos; its weakness is that each profession leaves the meeting and returns to its own forms. The method's instruments, the four‑dimension assessment of Life, Autonomy, Patrimony and Actors, the three‑level grading of warning signs, the forty‑eight‑hour securing checklist, are designed around a common structure that can be adapted across roles, so that an APS caseworker, a professional guardian and a court visitor can document the same categories of risk and protection in a mutually intelligible way, and a file that moves from one desk to another keeps its structure.

The second is documentation that makes the annual report meaningful. Where 60 percent of state forms do not record the person's preferences, the method's Will and Preference Documentation Record captures them, in the person's own words, on documented stable days. Where a file risks reducing capacity to a single assessment, the Dated State Log preserves its changes over time. Where a court cannot see why a measure was chosen, the Diagnosis‑to‑Action Synthesis Sheet ties each measure to the risk it addresses and schedules its reassessment. These are not new forms to add to the pile; they are the content that would make the forms the states already have worth reading.

The third is measurability, a need the networks themselves have repeatedly identified. The method comes with a fidelity protocol, an evaluation instrument and a planned reliability study for its assessment matrix. Whether it improves outcomes in an American setting is an empirical question, and I do not claim to have answered it. I claim that the method is built so that the question can be answered, which is what a network that must report impact rather than process needs most.

How it would work. The path is the one the networks already use: a working group in one state adopts the instruments for a pilot in one judicial circuit, adapts them to the state's forms, statutes and privacy rules, trains APS workers and guardians together rather than separately, and measures before and after on what the files contain, how often the person's preferences are recorded, how long it takes for a warning sign to reach escalation, how many orders are tailored rather than plenary. Training is the delivery vehicle, and it is the one WINGS have already built; a method gives the curriculum a practice to teach rather than a principle to recite. Exchanges to this effect are already under way with individuals who helped develop the WINGS model nationally and with participants in a state WINGS network, and they are the reason this work is based in the United States rather than conducted from abroad: a method is transmitted by practice, alongside the professionals who will use it, and adjusted with them.

The 2011 summit asked for partnerships, and the states built them. The 2021 summit asked for autonomy with accountability, and the networks adopted the agenda. What the networks' own reports make clear is the need for stronger implementation, documentation, comparability and outcome measurement. An operational methodology is one possible response to that gap, and a practitioner can offer it. Because it would travel through the training the networks already deliver, it would reach every professional they train, not one client at a time.