Underscores the importance of consistency and encouragement in trusting relationships. A Fostering Success peer mentor gave impactful advice to the youth she mentored: Stop listening to the people who don’t believe in you.

Explore additional resources to help effectively integrate lived experts into the child welfare workforce. 

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

Explore additional resources for effectively integrating lived experts into the child welfare workforce. 

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

Demonstrates how showing up and listening are foundational to developing a nourishing relationship with youth. A young woman describes the constant support she and her family received from a social worker as she evolved from a youth into a teen mom and an advocate.

Recorded webinar of youth with lived expertise and child and family serving agency leaders discussing strategies to support meaningful youth engagement and integrating family and youth voices at individual, practice, and system levels.

Use this brief to help your agency coordinate strategic and long-term planning, monitoring, and reporting processes—such as the Child and Family Services Plan (CFSP) and Child and Family Services Review (CFSR)—with agency continuous quality improvement (CQI).

Explore tips and strategies to effectively engage and sustain the involvement of families and youth at the agency level. 

​​Examine how implementation science principles can be applied to decisions about staging and scaling up new programs and practices at a child welfare agency.​ 

Explore sex trafficking prevention best practices for implementing provisions of the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act (P.L. 113-183).

Explore ways to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) children and youth.

Get an overview of the issues related to the physical and emotional safety of child welfare workers.

Learn how people with lived expertise have used their experiences to advocate for changes in approach, practice, and policy in child welfare. 

Explore how caseworkers, supervisors, and stakeholders can use data and feedback to improve child welfare practice.