Resource Library

Helps child welfare caseworkers improve their skills to better work with adoptive and foster families. Also helps caseworkers recognize and understand children who have experienced trauma.

Includes a series of articles that describe a process for delivering trauma screening, functional and clinical assessment, evidence-based interventions, and the use of progress monitoring in order to better achieve well-being outcomes.

Discusses the personal, professional, and organizational impacts of secondary traumatic stress on tribal child welfare workers and the unique resiliency factors present in tribal communities. Shares traditional practices and western methodologies that support resiliency and mitigate the impacts of secondary traumatic stress.

Provides information related to risk and protective factors and their role in identifying community changes. This section explores: a more in-depth understanding of risk and protective factors, when to look at the risk and protective factors for important issues, how to identify the specific risk and protective factors and how these factors will help your organization identify who should most benefit and how to make a difference. Additional tabs provide a checklist, examples, tools and a PowerPoint presentation.

Explores the needs behind and principles for selective services (services for children and families at moderate risk of discontinuity) that agencies can provide after permanency, offering examples of promising programs.

Offers self-care techniques and tools for tribal child welfare professionals.

Reviews the key concepts for understanding self-regulation, including the relationship between stress and self-regulation. Summarizes principal findings from a comprehensive review of self-regulation interventions. Addresses how current theory and knowledge of self-regulation may apply to programs and practitioners serving children and youth in different developmental groups from birth through young adulthood.

Identifies the seven core issues in adoption—loss, rejection, shame and guilt, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery and control—and explores how they affect children and families.

Discusses shared/co-parenting strategies that provide well-being, safety and stability for children in kinship families.  Five main points: 1) what are the pre-requisities to address when involving birth parents and relatives together in parenting; 2) what are some approaches used in getting caregiver and birth parent buy-in; 3) guidelines to consider in making co-parenting work in kinship care; 4) how to manage challenges that caregivers, relative caregivers and birth parents might experience due to pre-existing history and 5) what criteria should be used and considered in assessing if the family is ready for co-parenting.

Explores the START 24/7 conceptual framework and offers tools for implementation. Explains how START (Start Early, Trauma-informed, Attachment-focused, Resiliency-building, Therapeutic Services) can be used by parents and caregivers and others who support families after adoption and guardianship create an environment where parents and caregivers can plan for future needs of the child and family.