In 2022, AdoptUSKids created ten free webinars for child welfare professionals, along with tools, a discussion guide, and interviews with foster care alumni. We hope you’ll carve out some time to brush up on these resources as you enter into the new year. To make it easy, we’ve compiled the ones you just can’t miss below.
Ten webinars, with free recordings
These webinars cover recruitment, supporting families, and peer support.
Recruiting families:
- Data-driven diligent recruitment: Using data to recruit and sustain families
- Racial equity in targeted recruitment and support: Strategies for reaching and engaging families of color
- Recruiting foster and adoptive families of color: Stories and strategies from leaders of color in child welfare
Supporting families:
- How to support foster, adoptive, and kinship families of color
- Moving beyond trauma-informed to trauma-responsive support for families
- Stabilizing placements through relationships: Supporting resource parents to overcome relationship barriers
- Understanding, engaging, and supporting Native families
Peer support, support groups, and lived experience:
- Discussing racial identity in support groups
- Incorporating those with lived experience into your support services for adoptive, foster, and kinship families
- Peer support matters: Strategies to incorporate and elevate those with lived experience
Interviews with MPLD fellows
Each year, fellows in the AdoptUSKids MPLD program present findings from their research projects. In the below interviews, three MPLD alumni share their experiences in the program and important findings from their projects.
- In “Addressing moral injury in our profession,” Michelle Seymore says, “My goal was to associate hard costs—especially that of low workforce retention—to the problem of putting staff in circumstances that conflict with their moral code.”
- “Decreasing racial disparity in permanency: a conversation with Tatenda Perry” discusses the role that race plays in permanency disparities.
- “For Tamara Simmons, engaging fathers is critical” explores Tamara’s research project, “Strategies for Working with System-Involved Fathers.”
Tools, guides, and reports
- Assessing the racial and ethnic cultural competence of your support services is a tool to help get you started in building more culturally competent support services.
- Post-adoption and guardianship support across the country shares survey results from 46 states and three territories about the services they provide. For example, did you know a majority of states and territories don’t include respite services in their publicly funded post-adoption and guardianship support programs?
- If you are a parent group leader, use Supporting a positive racial identity for BIPOC children in transracial placements: a discussion guide to lead your group through important conversations around transracial placements.
- Tool for assessing and improving tribal support services is designed to help tribes improve their support services.
Stories from people with lived experience in foster care
- In “Finding my voice, changing my story,” Tawanna Brown discusses being adopted by her grandmother, how she started speaking out on children and trauma, and advice to people considering adoption from foster care.
- “Helping foster youth discover their dreams” explores Jamerika Haynes-Lewis’s experience of being in foster care, competing in pageants, and sharing her message as former USA Ambassador Ms. 2021.
- “‘I want people who are thinking about adopting to look beyond babies and toddlers’” is an article authored by Kandice Harmon, who was adopted when she was 11.
- Victor Sims was adopted out of Florida’s foster care system. In “‘I was adopted into the perfect family for me,’” Victor shares how his adoptive family helped him maintain connections with his birth family.
We hope you’ll join our growing community as we continue sharing resources with child welfare professionals in 2023. Subscribe to our newsletter and join us on LinkedIn.
