Resource Library

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. 

This video highlights the story of a therapeutic foster care social worker in North Carolina and how her own experience in kinship care helps her connect with kinship caregivers and engage families.

Buzzwords: Moving to Behavioral Descriptors doodle video is a short, animated video that follows a child involved in a child welfare investigation. The video describes what buzzwords are and illustrates the impact they can have on children and families. It also demonstrates how to recognize buzzwords and offers strategies for transforming buzzwords into objective, behavior-based descriptors.

This publication looks at buzzwords in the context of words or phrases commonly used in child welfare reporting and documentation that can be subjective or carry negative connotations, and offers strategies to minimize their negative impact.

Examine current research and how best to build organizational capacity in five areas, and learn about possible challenges and solutions.

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

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

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.

This tool is a role-playing activity, designed to help child welfare workers and supervisors become more familiar with the process of recognizing and translating buzzwords into descriptive language.

Learn about the value of kinship placements when children and youth must live outside their birth parents’ homes. 

Examine a five-step framework that helps organizations promote youth engagement in normalcy conversations about the youth’s own care.

Explore the various aspects of the importance of normalcy for children and youth in care.

Learn to facilitate a normalcy conversation and to promote normal and developmentally appropriate experiences for youth in foster care.

This video highlights the story of a program manager and lead navigator for the Montana Kinship Navigator Program and how her own experience caring for a nephew helps her better support and connect with kinship caregivers and families.

Learn about applications that can make information gathering more efficient, increase useful data, and help you better understand those you serve.