This National Foster Care Month (NFCM) event explores how agencies can partner with young people in the foster care system to build strong, supportive networks and achieve relational permanency.

Complete this template to create, print, and share a communication plan for your change effort. 

Identify data sources to explore your state’s system of foster and adoptive parent licensing, recruitment, and retention.

​Learn from people with lived experience about the impact of kinship care on children in the child welfare system.

Learn how Anntesha’s experience as a child living with her grandparents and later in foster care influenced her to become a relative caregiver to her niece and nephew and work as a kinship navigator. 

Learn about Dezzie’s experience bonding with her newborn while embracing parenting classes and other agency supports in her journey to be reunified with her daughter.

Learn about Catherine’s journey recovering from trauma and addiction to be successfully reunified with her daughter.

Use this brief to explore actionable strategies for meaningful partner engagement in child welfare agency strategic planning, monitoring, and review processes.

Explore tools and resources that can help states plan for family-strengthening activities aligned with the FFPSA and prevention-oriented collaboration strategies.

Recorded webinar of youth with lived expertise and child and family serving agency leaders discussing strategies to support meaningful youth engagement and integrating family and youth voices at individual, practice, and system levels.

Browse a list of organizations that offer training activities with defined learning objectives, including self-paced e-learnings, webinars, or videos.

Illustrates the four thematic pillars necessary for organizational capacity supporting engagement with young people currently and formerly in foster care. Each of the four segments succinctly defines an element of organizational capacity building for youth engagement.

Use this guide for tips, and strategies concerning the critical role leadership plays in creating and sustaining positive organizational culture.

Desiree is an alumna of the foster care system. She lived with the same foster care family for 14 years. She entered foster care with three of her siblings, and wants to use her experiences growing up in foster care to make a difference for those still in the system.

Get practical guidance for building organizational capacity and for implementing flexible and innovate programs for youth engagement.