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 26 resources
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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.

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Examines why teams should research possible intervention options, how to look for a wide variety of potential options, and what supporting evidence to look for in researching possible solutions.

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Explores how teams can assess an intervention to understand the potential for success with the target population; the fit with the system, agency, and context; and the capacity needed to implement it.

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Presents how teams can determine whether there is sufficient information about an intervention to be clear and easy to explain, useable (intervention has operational definitions and fidelity process or performance assessments), and in alignment with agency principles and values.

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Examines how teams can use a structured approach to determine if an existing intervention with adaptations meets agency needs or if teams need to design a new one.

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Describes how teams define the intervention by stating the purpose, goals, and guiding principles; identifying core components and how they align; and then further operationalizing after getting proposal approval.

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Presents how to develop a proposal by clearly explaining the intervention to establish a common understanding among stakeholders, and to support communication and decision-making.

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Explores how teams can operationalize core components to ensure the intervention meets key criteria, is based on research evidence, and has enough information for teams to carry it out in practice and to measure the results.

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Reviews the final tasks of adapting or developing practice profiles to describe the everyday practice of an intervention, support training and coaching to a desired practice, and help measure fidelity and performance outcomes.

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Emphasizes the importance of community and caseworker support in having the resources needed to promote family well-being, particularly when caring for children with special needs. This video highlights the perspective of a kinship caregiver who is an Athabaskan native teaching her grandchildren the Navajo culture and community traditions and passing down her grandparents' stories.

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

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Addresses the importance of being open to agency support and resources and the necessity of self-care in working through family transitions and meeting family needs. In this video, a kinship parent caring for her niece's children reflects on her family's strategies for raising children who have experienced trauma and the resources that enabled them to become effective kinship caregivers.

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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.

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Highlights the significant impact agency staff have on the kinship and foster parent experience and in helping families serve as a resource for the birth families of the children in their care. This video presents one family's story of becoming a kinship resource and how support from their foster care specialist guided their decision.

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Demonstrates the benefits and challenges of serving as a kinship/foster parent and supporting and collaborating with children's biological parents. This video highlights one caregiver's decision to foster and adopt her son and become a kinship caregiver to his younger sibling. She discusses how she maintained a close, supportive relationship with their biological mother and how they ultimately created a united, blended family.