Discover strategies to effectively integrate people with lived expertise into the child welfare workforce.

Explore additional resources to help effectively integrate lived experts into the child welfare workforce. 

Explore a family-focused program that embodies many of the changes that Kentucky wants to see throughout its child welfare system in this podcast. The START, program demonstrates a shift in organizational culture to focus on family and serves as an example of a truly collaborative team that uses early intervention and a shared decision-making model to work with families.

Demonstrates how showing up and listening are foundational to developing a nourishing relationship with youth. A young woman describes the constant support she and her family received from a social worker as she evolved from a youth into a teen mom and an advocate.

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.

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

​​Examine how implementation science principles can be applied to decisions about staging and scaling up new programs and practices at a child welfare agency.​ 

Explore ways to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) children and youth.

Learn a research-informed framework for agencies to explore implementation of CQI systems across seven areas, including leadership support and modeling, staff and stakeholder engagement, communication, administrative structure, use of quality data, case record review process, and application of CQI findings.

Explore the benefits of and strategies for recruiting and integrating people with lived expertise into the child welfare workforce.

Learn how people with lived expertise have used their experiences to advocate for changes in approach, practice, and policy in child welfare. 

Explore how caseworkers, supervisors, and stakeholders can use data and feedback to improve child welfare practice. 

Explore additional resources to learn about key considerations to sustain research and evaluation partnerships with people with lived expertise and minimize harm. 

Learn about key considerations to sustain research and evaluation partnerships with people with lived expertise and minimize harm. 

Use the integrated Theory of Change video workbook to record your questions and ideas for changing practice, which you can then use to apply the theory of change development process at your agency.