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.

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 the key components of engaging youth and families in individual permanency planning.

Support agency staff in the authentic engagement of youth and families in individual permanency planning processes.

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

The journeys of children, youth, and families in child welfare are seldom a straight line. Typically, there are highs and lows and winding paths in between

Understand available technologies and best practices for holding virtual meetings.

Learn how child welfare agencies can transfer select operations online and out of a central worksite.

Get ideas for working with community foundations, endowments, and charitable trusts to improve outcomes for children and youth.

Learn how leveraging NGO connections in the community can help child welfare systems be more flexible and adaptable in achieving program goals.