Our commitment to the adoption and foster care community does not end with the family; we are also dedicated to strengthening the competence of the systems that surround them. We provide training and consultation to public and private child welfare agencies throughout the state of Maryland. We offer a variety of supportive services to agencies and the families and children they serve.  In addition to the professional development of staff and resource parents through training, we provide clinical case consultation in a variety of formats and settings to individual workers and supervisors as well as groups.  Topic areas commonly include trauma, resource parent support and education, permanency best-practices, and the competencies needed to stabilize and strengthen family systems.

Agency Testimonials

Workshop Descriptions

Families Connected offers workshops and specialized training in numerous areas related to foster care and adoption. We will also work directly with your program to create a specialized training curriculum to meet the needs of your staff and the clients served. Listed below are brief descriptions of trainings we have provided to local agencies and private providers.

This workshop offers an essential overview of trauma, insecure of attachment, and the steps necessary for doing repair. Parents and staff will be able to reinterpret challenging behaviors as symptoms of trauma and learned methods of coping rather than defiance or manipulation. This strengths-based approach to understanding trauma will serve as the framework for introducing parenting strategies that support and encourage a healing process for their child.

This workshop outlines and reviews 3 core competencies necessary for effective foster parenting, which include an understanding of trauma and the ability to reinterpret behavior as coping strategy, the use of self awareness and self monitoring to distinguish between the child’s needs and the parent’s needs, and the ability to appropriately and effectively use consequence and reward. This workshops outlines the fundamental differences between parenting traumatized and non-traumatized children and distinguishes a critical, reparative function to the foster parent/foster child relationship.

This workshop outlines the developmental tasks of adolescence, including separation and individuation, and explores how each are severely impacted by trauma and the foster care experience. This overview provides a useful context for parents and staff as they attempt to make sense of the changes their foster youth is experiencing and support them as they encounter the challenges that are unique to this developmental period. This workshop also offers tools and strategies to parents for understanding behavior and responding in a trauma-informed way that promotes healing and preserves the parent/child relationship.

This workshop redefines the service agreement as not only a necessary court document, but a significant tool for setting a tone of collaboration between the agency and a family. This workshop outlines the characteristics of an effective service agreement, including the importance of it being child-specific, comprehensive, measurable and used as working document that is routinely revisited and modified. Tools, strategies and specific language will be explored for how to engage families through the development of the service agreement in a manner that creates collaboration, accountability and transparency.

This workshop outlines the critical functions of visitation to included parental skill development, parent/child relationship repair and strengthening, and case worker assessment. This workshop offers a model for visitation that not only sets families up for success, but supports agency assessments and recommendations in court. It highlights the critical relationship between the service agreement and a visitation plan as well as the importance of full-disclosure with regard to needs, expectations, timelines and possible outcomes.

This workshop prioritizes permanency as a foster child’s greatest unmet need. It outlines the various forms successful permanency achievement can take, including legal and non-legal out- comes. Common barriers to permanency will be identified and staff and foster parents will be challenged to consider how their role can be used to prohibit or support permanency success. For Staff, permanency best practices are reviewed, including permanency tools and resources.

Professionals and caretakers working with traumatized families, children, and youth often experience secondary trauma symptoms, many of which are mislabeled or even unrecognized. This workshop identifies secondary trauma as having significant impact on the effectiveness of our work and offers tools for identifying vulnerabilities, increasing self awareness, and employing effective coping strategies.

Openness in adoption can look many different ways. This workshop provides an expansive definition of open adoption and provides a child-focused, strengths-based perspective on the benefits of maintaining family connection. Parental anxieties and child best interests are differentiated and explored as well as the range of post adoption agreements that constitute openness.

This workshop offers a clinical application to a tool that has been used in the adoption/foster care field for some time. Having honest and accurate information is a significant way for a child to manage anxiety. There are several essential questions that must be answered for all foster children: What is foster care? How did I come to be in it? What can I expect to happen next? Where am I going? And what needs to occur to get me there? This workshop reviews a specific lifebook tool that addresses these essential questions in a tangible, interactive manner. The role of the professional and foster parent in the book’s development and use is outlined.

In the state of Maryland, a child over the age of 10 must consent to his/her own adoption. A youth saying “no” to having a forever family is a profound and often consequential barrier to permanency. This workshop reminds families and staff that the answer, “No.” to the question, “Do you want to be adopted?” is the BEGINNING of the conversation about permanency with the youth NOT the end. This workshop offers insight about what is beneath the “no” when a child speaks out against permanency and how to give them the tools and resources to process the feelings and experiences that are driving their decision.