Frankie is 14 years old and lives with his sister, brothers, and moms. He and his sister were adopted when they were 2 years old and 4 years old, respectively. He loves spending time with his aunts, uncles, and cousins and loves being part of a big family.

Listen to a foster care advocate’s mental health journey.

Hear a foster and adoptive father of African American boys talk about fighting cultural biases to support his sons’ well-being.

Listen to a judge and a child welfare agency leader discuss the challenges, achievements, and strategies of the Tompkins County Family Treatment Court. This longstanding collaboration between the child welfare, substance use treatment, and judicial systems has been steadily growing its Family Treatment Court Team and improving outcomes for families since 2001.

Shares Stephen’s story about being a community-based provider and policymaker in Florida, the need for laws that empower caregiver decision-making, creating Florida’s reasonable and prudent parent standard (RPPS), and the effect RPPS and normalcy laws can have on foster care.

Listen to child welfare agency leaders in the District of Columbia, service providers, partners in community collaboratives, and sister agencies talk about how they coordinate service planning and delivery, are culturally responsive to the community, and provide seamless services to families.

Listen to child welfare agency leaders in the District of Columbia talk about how they work with partners to use their different data lenses to understand the needs of families and to structure a set of services to best meet the full spectrum of needs. In Kentucky, child welfare agency leaders describe the process of finding the story behind the numbers to transform their system.

Meet the series cohosts as they talk about sharing lived expertise and power with child welfare agency leaders and staff.

Hear about the experiences of sharing power between a child welfare agency leader in Nevada and a young adult with lived expertise.

Hear how sharing power begins with building trusting relationships.

Hear a father and an agency administrator talk about what needs to be in place to make family engagement easier.

In this introduction to the podcast series How We Partner With the Community to Improve Service Options, agency leaders talk about the changing culture of their organizations. Leaders from Kentucky discuss their Child Welfare Transformation initiative, three transformational goals, and culture of safety.

Explore the efforts agencies, community collaborative organizations, and others are making to bring families, youth, and communities to the table as they strive to improve the child welfare system in this podcast. 

Watch this recorded webinar to learn how other jurisdictions encourage kinship care placements and then discuss kinship support with your team.

Bruce and Brenda have been married for 33 years and have four daughters. From 2006 to 2009, they provided a kinship placement for their four grandchildren. In 2010, the couple adopted Bruce (now 18 years old), Tre’Nae (now 15 years old), Mason (now 13 years old), and Kiaunna (now 10 years old).