PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Learning experiences that stay with you
People don’t change because of information. They change through experience, reflection, and connection. That's what we build every session around.
“This didn’t feel like training. It felt like something I needed.”
—Training participant
We don’t rely on lectures and don’t get caught up on credentials.
Instead, we facilitate learning through hands-on activities, storytelling, reflection, and structured dialogue — creating environments where participants connect, share insights, and generate their own meaning. We don't give all the answers. We ask the right questions to open up what participants already know and help them go deeper.
Find the right fit for your team
TWO WAYS TO TRAIN WITH US
OPEN ENROLLMENT
BSF Institute
You come to us.
Join a scheduled workshop open to individuals and small teams. Browse upcoming sessions, register seat-by-seat, and join a cohort of professionals from across the field.
Sessions scheduled throughout the year
Open to any individual professional
Great for small teams or solo learners (look for the group discount)
Live online
CONTRACT-BASED
Professional Development Trainings (custom-created for your team)
We come to you.
BSF designs a custom mix of trainings for your organization — in-person or online, for groups of up to 30 people. This is whole-team, tailored, and built around what your staff actually needs.
We customize the curriculum for your context
Delivered in-person or virtually
Groups of up to 30 people
Trusted by state child welfare agencies and community programs nationwide
You're not alone. Most professional development is built around information delivery. Ours is built around transformation.
Every session is designed with the principles of adult learning in mind: adults bring rich life experience, learning must be immediately applicable, and growth happens through doing — not just listening.
Our secret sauce is positivity. Grounded in positive psychology, our sessions surface difficult truths — not to dwell in them, but to move through them. Participants leave with more hope and energy than they came in with.
Our approach was shaped by founder Kathryn Leigh Goetz, PhD, who brings decades of leadership and a deep background in transpersonal psychology to this work.
Tired of trainings that sound good but don't stick?
No hierarchy. No “right answers.”
We create flat, safe learning environments where everyone‘s experience has value — including the parents and families your staff serve.
The parallel process, built in
Our training mirrors the way we want staff to show up with families. You can‘t teach empathy through a slide deck. We model what we‘re asking participants to do.
Tools you can use Monday morning
Practical, immediately applicable skills — not abstract frameworks. 93% of participants report learning new tools or strategies they hadn't encountered elsewhere.
People leave different
We hear about it long after the training ends. A shift in how supervisors listen. Staff asking better questions. Families engaged differently. That‘s the measure.
What participants walk away with
Practical tools they can use immediately in their daily work with families and youth
Stronger communication and facilitation skills grounded in relationship-based practice
Deeper understanding of how relationships drive outcomes with families, youth, and their teams
93%
of participants learned new tools or strategies they hadn’t received elsewhere
“Be Strong Families has proven to be an invaluable resource for our organization, helping us to build the capacity of our team and community partners across the state. Their approach to adult learning, combined with their deep understanding of family and community challenges, make each program valuable. Skills and strategies learned were immediately applicable to their work.”
— Danielle Dill, MPH, Program Manager, Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth
What our participants & partners say
Available Professional Development events & trainings
Below are all available Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (Illinois DCFS or IDCFS) events and trainings offered by Be Strong Families. These events are complimentary to IDCFS Child Welfare Professionals. To register, click the event’s name on the schedule above.
All IDCFS trainings are available in English and Spanish.
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This workshop for child welfare professionals introduces the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors framework as an important component of a comprehensive wellbeing paradigm and links the framework to trauma-informed child welfare practice, demonstrating its practical benefits for bridging communications between child welfare staff, courts, and families. This workshop is customized with and for the jurisdiction in which it will be provided so that it is maximally relevant for participants.
Format: In-person OR Online, 8-hours (full day or two half days)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals Only -
This 8-week parent education series is based on the Living the Protective Factors Playbook which contains 49 days of activities and weekly themes for parents to learn about, explore, and build the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors at home. Every week for two hours, parents come together in a fun, inspirational and educational environment to share their experiences and weekly Playbook homework, learn from each other, gain insight from the group and the group leader, feel supported in their parenting, expand their repertoire of parenting strategies, and gain a deeper understanding of what gets in the way of being a strong, loving family-including childhood trauma.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 16 hours
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Other people’s trauma impacts our well-being, regardless of whether the other people are our friends, clients, co-workers, or family members. Learning how vicarious trauma affects us is the first step to improving our well-being and ability to sustain positive relationships. This workshop begins with learning about and identifying our own signs of trauma exposure response and our emotional triggers. Participants 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 workshop offers tools for increasing awareness, skills, and tools for understanding how to best respond when trauma or trauma history is in play. The workshop concludes by making a self-care plan using the Be Strong Families Domains of Vitality so people can stay strong and attend to their relationships.
Format: Online or In-person
Total Training Hours: 6 hours
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Be Strong Families has worked (and is working) with former parents with child welfare involvement to develop resources that support parents whose children are in the foster care system in getting their kids back and keeping them safely at home. In this workshop, staff will learn about the Get on the Fast Track workshop and group support that they can make available to their clients and the benefits that parents report on participating in the workshop.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
Family Support
Learn and build skills to raise healthy, balanced children who have the resources to reach their full potential.
Youth Development
Build and develop your goals to inspire and motivate youth to reach their fullest potential.
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Navigating the child welfare system is difficult for any parent and doing the work to get one’s children returned home is a monumental feat. When reunification is the permanency goal, maintaining strong family ties while the child is out of their parents’ home is essential. Child welfare staff can do a lot to facilitate the process of maintaining family connectedness. This four-hour workshop highlights the importance of maintaining family connectedness and assists child welfare front line staff with understanding how they can strengthen family ties throughout the life of a case.
Format: Online or In-person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
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Often when children are involved with child welfare, elements of their history can be lost due to a variety of reasons—including multiple placements. Lifebooks are an essential tool in trauma-informed parenting. This training is designed to assist participants with understanding the value of a Lifebook for a child in care and the ways in which the collaborative process of developing a Lifebook can promote psychological well-being and assist with maintaining positive family ties as well as partnerships between parents with child welfare involvement and caregivers.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
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This workshop introduces child welfare staff to Be Strong Families’ Shared Parenting workshop for parents and caregivers. It also assists them with promoting healthy, meaningful working relationships and partnerships between parents and caregivers. The curriculum is also infused with strategies for effectively engaging parents and enhancing capacity to:
• Find commonalities and promote harmony and collaboration between caregivers and parents
• Practice communication skills for challenging conversations
• Expand empathy and let go of judgment
• Develop strategies to work together to benefit children in care
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
Self-Care & Skill-Building
Gain the knowledge and supplemental skills you need to mobilize positive change and strong client relationships.
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This training challenges workers to understand their own story within their work, helping them understand the elements of themselves that they bring into their practice. Participants will spend time examining and dealing with their own biases and triggers as well as exploring how to set appropriate boundaries with the families they serve—ensuring that they are recognizing their own limitations and supporting themselves through intentional self-care. Participants will learn how to use the five Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors to build a strength-based parent profile and to deepen the way they engage with the families they serve. Workers leave with tools they can immediately put into practice as an Agent of Positive Change.
Format: Online OR In-person: 1 full-day (8 hours) or 2 half-days (4 hours each)
Audience: Agency Staff Only
Customized version available for: Child Welfare Professionals
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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 workshop uses Art of Hosting conversation technologies and interactive, experiential activities to surface issues that are sapping energy — causing frustration and burnout at work — and then uses the Protective Factors to address them. This workshop adds depth and dimension to the practice of Living the Protective Factors. Participants leave feeling re-connected to their purpose and passion, supported by their colleagues, and with more tools in their toolbox to thrive in their work with families.
Format: Online OR In-person: 1 full-day (8 hours) or 2 half-days (4 hours each)Audience: Agency Staff Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Effective work with families depends on staff’s ability to engage and partner with them. Utilizing an extended role-play format, this experiential workshop for professionals assists practitioners with developing empathy for their clients and in-depth understanding of the challenges they face. It encourages self-reflection as a foundation for strengthening parent engagement skills. Be Strong Families works with practitioners to customize this workshop for their program’s needs and the specific situations of their clients.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
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This hands-on, activity-based, experiential workshop builds family-serving staff members’ parent engagement skills. Participants also increase their understanding of how their personal attitudes and professional practices contribute to or undermine positive partnerships with parents. Promoting positive outcomes for children is best achieved when the whole family is accepted and supported in an approach that strengthens the family.
Recognizing the parent-child bond as the first, most important relationship in a child’s life, it is essential to have strong, positive relationships with the whole family-including fathers. Having such relationships allows for programs to implement programs that value principles of family-centered practice. This training promotes awareness of the importance of developing skills in building relationships with families through a variety of reflective and interactive activities.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 8 hours (1 full day or two half-days)
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Being able to recognize when a family needs support is important, but whether they get what they need is often impacted by how we, as service providers, communicate with them. This interactive workshop assists participants with understanding why certain conversations are difficult and how they could become less so. Participants will practice effective communication skills and develop action plans for implementing them with parents.
Format: Online or In-person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
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Responding to signs of child abuse and neglect is crucial—and research now allows us to start earlier in keeping children safe and families strong. By recognizing and responding to early signs of stress, family-serving staff can assist families with getting the support they need to promote the health and well-being of their family and prevent abuse and neglect. This training will support participants getting in touch with their own stress and help them recognize early signs of family stress.
Format: Online or In-Person
Total Training Hours: 4 hours
Parent Engagement
Experience exercises and discussions that empower your engagement with the parents you serve.
Healing Trauma
Understand trauma-informed practices at a deep level that enables you to support the well-being of families.