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

Watch the Change and Implementation in Practice: Overview video to learn how key steps, tasks, and concepts fit together to support your agency’s change initiatives. 

Build a common understanding of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) best practices and learn how your CQI team can apply those practices as your agency works to strengthen families, deliver equitable services, and build more resilient communities.

Listen to an attorney and a parent ally, both partners with Washington State’s child welfare system, explain how parent partner programs are essential to prevention services.

Listen to Indiana’s child welfare partners talk about making the shift to an upstream approach to prevention services possible in this short podcast. 

Explore the Capacity Building Center for States’ most up-to-date diversity, racial equity, and inclusion terms and definitions. 

Use this discussion guide with the CWVE 2021 videos to access a description of each topic, individual reflection questions to facilitate personal, on-demand learning, and conversation starters and team activities for child welfare staff and collaborative partners.  

Available on CapLEARN; registration required.

Watch and discuss what you hear from firsthand accounts of resource parents sharing the impact of support and collaborative partnerships when working with children, youth, and their families. Agencies can use the videos and discussion guide to explore the impact of agency staff, peer, family, and community support structures on resource parents. 

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.

Listen to a youth support partner tell her story of living in kinship care with her grandmother and being reunified with her mother. She discusses the difficulties during her time in care and the system support that might have helped to promote a better relationship with her mother. As a mentor, she helps youth heal from trauma and use their voice in positive ways.

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

Highlights the beneficial role of agency support and encouragement to caregivers in ensuring effective foster parenting and successful reunification measures. In this video, a foster parent discusses the importance of communication and trust between caregivers and biological family members, along with agency training and resources, for successful reunification.

This video is a part of the Empowering Caregivers, Strengthening Families Video Series. It demonstrates key aspects of agency support to caregivers, including the importance of quality personal contact, training, and resources to empower caregivers through the process of moving from foster parenting to adoption.

Demonstrates the power of positive caregiver perspective alongside child welfare agency encouragement and support. In this video, caregivers share the concerns they had about becoming foster parents and discuss the resources that helped them become committed and effective foster parents.

Emphasizes the need for agency assistance and openness toward creative therapeutic services such as music lessons and highlights the need for a strong caregiver support group. This video shares one caregiver’s positive experience working with older youth with special needs in therapeutic foster care.