Resource Library

The Center for States designs products, services, and learning experiences to increase understanding and awareness, and build knowledge and skills. The Center focuses its attention on developing products and resources on several core organizational and practice topics.

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The Center for States provides research assistance and responds to information requests on building capacity in child welfare.

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Showing 1 - 15 of 163 resources
Video

This video tells the story of how a family court judge in Hancock County, Mississippi, works with families and stakeholders to support reunification through a trauma-informed, family-centered approach.

Video

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.

Video

Learn about negotiating boundaries, communication, support, and normalcy from a young person formally in foster care and her adoptive parents.

Video

Explore the supportive relationship between a youth and her attorney.

Video

Highlights the role agency resources and family support can play in helping kinship families face challenges. This video discusses an aunt's decision to become a full-time caregiver for her niece and her niece's daughter, and the importance home visits played in the transition.

Video

Reveals how advocating for youth makes a difference in system change and in the advocates’ own lives. The Director of Policy and Advocacy at NMCAN and a youth advocate talk about their shared experience in testifying as expert witnesses for state legislative committees and how it created a strong bond between them.

Video

Explores the task of assessing the results of the pilot, reviewing progress, and making adjustments before large-scale implementation of an intervention.

Video

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.

Video

Examines tasks of building capacity to implement the intervention in new locations or with new populations in a sustainable way and scaling up the intervention.

Video

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.

PDF

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.

Video

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

Video

Explores how the factors of motivation, general capacity, and intervention-specific capacity influence agency readiness for change. This video provides examples of and considerations for conducting readiness assessments.

Video

Explores the first task of team building: identifying the team’s purpose by developing mission goals and objectives. This module helps the team write a mission statement as part of a change and implementation process at a child welfare agency.

Video

Examines the third task, developing the pathway or pathways of change to reach the long-term outcome, and provides examples of how to apply strategies. Casual links connect the root cause(s) of the problem to the long-term outcome, and “tell the story of how success will be recognized” at each level in the pathway.