Session D

There comes a time for every person, every team, and every organization when things must change. When adversity has become too powerful, and brings out the worst in us, and we must choose a different approach to change the game. Indeed, we miss the biggest opportunity for transformation when we fail to use adversity to our advantage. How does stress cause dysfunction in leaders?? This presentation will provide breakthrough, aha moments to help participants shift out of their old, habitual, stress-induced patterns of behavior that aren’t working for them. Meg specializes in helping people and organizations stop doing all the stupid things they’re doing, build awareness that shifts perspectives, and opens the door to let everyone move forward. Attendees will: Understand the neuroscience and psychology of stress and emotion in the context of effective leadership; Learn a simple, 2-step methodology to hack the brain’s natural, dysfunctional response to adversity; and Begin to gain skill in identifying when adversity has knocked you sideways, and how to immediately shift to a more successful approach. 

In the fall of 2021, the American Pediatric Society announced a state of emergency for children and youth mental health. We are seeing higher levels of anxiety and depression than ever before, a problem that is only compounded in children who have experience in the child welfare system. Time in nature has a proven impact on the mental health of children, youth, and families, lowering anxiety levels, increasing wellbeing, and creating a sense of community. Hear from the children and nature movement about easy ways to include nature into interventions and engage in activities to learn best practices.  

Community Based Care (CBC) has expanded in the past year so please join this session to learn what’s new and how your organization can be a part of the growing and evolving CBC in Texas. In this workshop, participants will get a status update from the leadership of the SSCCs in Texas and hear how each SSCC is designing a unique approach to delivering quality foster care services in their own community. Additionally, they will look ahead and next steps for each CBC area and ways network organizations can be ready.

The Children’s Bureau cites access to concrete supports as a critical protective factor in promoting the health well-being of children and families, mitigating stress that sometimes precipitates maltreatment. However, child welfare systems face challenges in assessing community resource availability and capacity, understanding service gaps, and a lack of tools necessary to monitor and report on outcomes of services provided for children and families under their care. This workshop will focus on how technology can be harnessed in developing robust systems of care. Participants will examine the implementation of a service-referral platform in Central Florida that interconnects available services based on zip codes across an entire geographic area. We will discuss how Kids Central, a leading community-based care agency in Florida, has integrated technology as a central ingredient to their community-based prevention model. Participants will walk with practical tools on how to strategically re-invent connections of services to families both pre and post crisis to support children and families transitioning safely back into the community, reducing the likelihood of a recurring involvement with the child welfare system.  

Isaac Etter will share with us his experiences as a transracial adoptee, ways parents can prepare for transracial adoption, and best ways to support and encourage their transracial adoptee. Isaac will share resources and leave time for a Q&A. Isaac will also walk briefly walk through his original idea for re-thinking post placement support, what went wrong, lessons learned, and impact. He will use introduce videos and the Identity Learning Community platform to help agencies think about how they can utilize technology to have a deeper impact on family retention and support. 

Through this workshop participants will hear from Texas based child welfare agencies who participated in BBI Quality Improvement Collaboratives about their experiences and the impact on their programs.  We will discuss what’s involved in enhancing youth guided care, family engagement and identifying natural supports for youth and families who experience community-based and/or residential interventions. The approaches discussed will address that regardless of the setting, meaningful engagement and quality aftercare support services are critical to youth and families achieving positive outcomes post intervention.