How do good family service programs evolve into great, beloved community resources? How can family-serving programs embody servant leadership and work towards social justice in their everyday activities? Part of the answer lies in how they engage families. In this four-hour workshop, participants will build upon their strengths in developing and nurturing positive, healing relationships between providers and parents, explore the barriers they are encountering, and design practical solutions for overcoming these barriers. They will learn about how attending concretely to multiple dimensions of equity (political, social, economic) in everyday program practices can enhance their greatness. By better understanding how power dynamics and implicit biases can get in the way of forming working partnerships, participants will enhance their effectiveness in designing and implementing actionable, co-creative strategies for inclusive budgeting, governing, and planning with parents.

Format: Online or In-person

Total Training Hours: 4 hours

For child welfare staff who understand the basics of trauma-informed practice and the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors, this workshop takes that practice one step further. Participants explore how the concept of emotional safety contributes to transformation and healing and the importance of emotional safety as part of safety and well-being, transformative child welfare practice, and parenting. This training introduces participants to Appreciative Inquiry as an interviewing method that, along with the Protective Factors, can surface meaningful strengths to build on for family reunification. Participants use a case-study method, working from a sample case plan description, to create a strengths-based parent profile.

Format: Online or In-Person

Total Training Hours: 4 hours

Targeted toward staff who work with youth in care, this workshop offers the Youth Thrive™ Protective and Promotive Factors framework as a tool for thinking about, organizing, and enhancing their services. Through fun, interactive small-group work, professionals emphatically experience the Youth Thrive™ Protective and Promotive Factors. They also build critical thinking and human-centered design skills to their work with teenagers involved with child welfare. Participants explore how the stages of teenage development are impacted by trauma what it means to work with and help a teen; stages of development and how trauma impacts youth development are discussed.

Format: Online OR In-person: 1 full-day (8 hours) or 2 half-days (4 hours each)

Total Training Hours: 8 hours

Format: Online or In-Person

Total Training Hours: 16 hours

Module 1: Using the Protective Factors to Overcome Challenges at Work (4 hours)

The Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors are a powerful tool for keeping families strong and children safe, but they can also be deployed to solve almost any thorny problem or complex challenge. This module uses conversation technologies and interactive, experiential activities to surface issues that are sapping energy and causing frustration and burnout at work and then uses the Protective Factors to address them. Participants have an opportunity to re‐connect to their purpose and passion, feel supported by their colleagues, with more tools in their toolbox to thrive at work and in their work.

Module 2: Trauma‐Informed Supervisory Practice: Part 1 (4 hours)

Trauma impacts our well-being, whether the other people are our friends, our clients, our coworkers, or our family members. Learning how vicarious trauma affects us is the first step to improving our well-being and our ability to sustain positive relationships. This module begins with learning about and identifying our own signs of trauma exposure response and our emotional triggers. Supervisors practice strategies for de‐escalating their own and others’ emotional responses in the moment. Further, they learn a framework for reading and shifting their own and others’ energy to move into a positive relational zone. This module offers tools for increasing staff awareness, skills, and tools for understanding how to best respond when trauma or trauma history is in play. This module concludes by exploring the ways in which supervisory relationships can support a trauma‐responsive practice and how workers and supervisors can co‐create safe interpersonal space for reflection and skill‐building.

Module 3: Trauma‐Informed Supervisory Practice: Part 2 (4 hours)

This experiential module takes off from where Part 1 (Module 2) left off by assuming reflective supervisory practice and diving deeper into what concrete coaching skills may be effectively deployed in these conversations. While effective supervisors may naturally and intuitively mobilize these techniques without having explicitly learned them, this module makes the implicit explicit. Supervisors have the opportunity to both learn about and practice coaching skills such as: asking appreciative, empowering questions; clarifying; goal setting; reframing; planting a seed; celebrating; affirming; validating; championing; asking permission; and active listening. This module is highly interactive, energizing, playful, and maximizes participants' creativity.

Module 4: The Art of Trauma‐Informed, Relationship‐Based Engagement (4 hours)

Effective work with others depends on the supervisor’s ability to engage and partner. Utilizing an extended role‐play format, this experiential module for supervisors assists practitioners with developing empathy for their staff and in‐depth understanding of the challenges they face. It encourages self‐reflection as a foundation for strengthening their staff engagement skills while practicing the skills learned in previous modules. Be Strong Families works with agencies to customize this module for their program’s needs and the specific situations of their staff.