Programs

The Solihull Approach Foster Carer Course is intended for foster carers who want to know more about their foster child's development and about sensitive and effective caring. It aims to develop a framework for foster carers to think about carer/child relationships which can be developed into a lifelong skill. This in turn promotes understanding of their foster child's behavior and aims to help develop effective strategies to manage the child's behavior.

Fostering Relationships is designed to support families with young children in the foster care system. Birth parents work with a mentor and their child’s foster parent with the aim of decreasing child distress, improving birth parent expectations and play behaviors, and improving the birth and foster parent relationship. For the first 5 visits that a birth parent has with their child, foster parents transport children to visitation and stay in the visitation. Having both caregivers present in initial visitations can help decrease distress in children. Prior to each visitation, birth parents meet with a mentor that teaches them how to anticipate child distress or reticence and follow their children’s lead during play. Lastly, the program teaches foster parents to make comments in-the-moment that support birth parents following their children’s lead. Foster parents are encouraged to support birth parents and help birth parents play with their young children in a way that promotes regulatory skills.

The Keeping Kids in Mind (KKIM) group-work parenting program is designed to assist parents to see through their children's eyes the experience and impact of being trapped in medium- to high-level chronic parental conflict and to develop greater awareness and understanding about how to support children following family separation. KKIM is a two-and-a-half-hour weekly psychoeducational group that focuses on the development of parental reflective functioning; that is, developing the parents' awareness about the impact of their behaviour upon their children and developing their ability to think and consider their children's wellbeing in their actions and communications with their child's other parent. The group meets for a duration of five weeks and is designed for up to 15 participants.

ARC Reflections is a skills-building curriculum for foster and other resource caregivers, with an emphasis on building trauma-informed capacities in the child welfare resource caregiver community. Based on the core Attachment, Regulation and Competency (ARC) framework, ARC Reflections emphasizes understanding and responding to youth behavior from a trauma-informed lens, development of safe caregiving relationships, support for youth regulation, and the caregiver role in facilitating developmental competency.

CYPM is for child welfare agencies with youth receiving any level of services that are at-risk for or have been referred to or become involved with the juvenile justice system and for juvenile justice departments with youth who are subsequently referred to and become involved in the child welfare system because of suspicions of abuse/neglect. CYPM is designed to create a multisystem approach to identification of youth, assessment of needs, collaborative case planning, and ongoing case management. The model is designed to provide a foundation that helps jurisdictions work collaboratively with the goals of improving system functioning and outcomes for youth. The model implements a process that seeks to reduce the number of youth who crossover between the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, the number of youth entering and reentering out-of-home care, the length of stay in out-of-home care, the use of congregate care, and the disproportionate representation of children of color. The CYPM infuses into this work values and standards; manualized practices, policies; and procedures; and quality assurance processes.

The Resource Parent Curriculum (RPC) (officially titled Caring for Children Who Have Experienced Trauma: A Workshop for Resource Parents) is an eight-module workshop designed to educate resource parents on the effects of trauma on the children in their care. The workshop is led by a professional facilitator and a co-facilitator with lived experience as a resource parent. The RPC features activities in each module where caregivers apply the concepts learned to a child currently placed in their home. Each module also includes interactive group activities and discussions to promote shared learning.

The content of RPC is centered on nine Essential Elements of Trauma-Informed Parenting. The Essential Elements are centered around recognizing trauma's impact, understanding and providing physical and psychological safety, understanding and managing difficult behaviors and emotions, respecting and promoting relationships, developing a strengths-based life story, practicing advocacy, promoting trauma-informed services, and practicing parent self-care.

The program was designed specifically for the parents of children in out-of-home care. Restoration may or may not be part of the case plan. The course is not designed to give participants practical parenting help, rather its aim is to give participants an opportunity to reflect on their experiences and provide an opportunity for change. The program uses metaphor as a therapeutic process of change and works within an attachment framework.

This course is designed to have genuine respect and dignity shown to the participants by the facilitators. Facilitators must be nonjudgmental, accepting of difference, supportive, and respectful in order that, where appropriate. They are able to challenge the participants in their thinking, behaviour, or world view.

TST-FC is a 4-module group-based training for resource parents and birth parents of youth in foster care. It is designed to provide training on definitions and impact of trauma, as well as specific approaches and interventions to parent more effectively, including a focus on parental self-care. TST-FC provides a trauma-informed approach based on the Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) model. Staff within a foster care agency are identified and trained to be TST-FC trainers. TST-FC can be used as a stand-alone model, or in conjunction with full TST implementation.

The Strive™ Supervised Visitation Program is a manualized parent education and support intervention/prevention program delivered in the context of parent-child visits to enhance parent engagement and the quality of parent-child visits. The program is designed to be delivered by lay visit supervisors who have been trained as Strive Visit Navigators (VN) to use the strengths-based, relationship-focused, trauma-informed and developmentally tailored features of the curriculum. By reaching out to parents early in their visiting experience, ideally before the first visit, the program aims to provide a supportive environment where goals and expectations are clear, a trusted connection with parents is built, and positive parenting practices and skills are developed and/or reinforced. Each parent is assigned their own VN to help prepare them to successfully navigate the often challenging and traumatic parent-child visit experience.

The Permanency Navigator Program - Adoption Network Cleveland provides supportive services to help families who are seeking to provide a permanent home for a child-in-need be successful in completing the adoption or guardianship process. The permanency navigator, who is a paraprofessional, provides peer-support and education to help parents set realistic expectations, overcome barriers and access resources.

The Permanency Navigator Program should be part of nonprofit organization that is not the adoption agency, and the permanency navigator can therefore be seen as a safe, neutral source of information and support. The permanency navigator is available to families by phone and in person to help families stay engaged in the process, answer questions, provide technical assistance and refer to resources.

Through a partnership with the public child welfare agency, the permanency navigator reaches out to families seeking to become foster or adoptive parents, or those who have gotten bogged down in the process. The permanency navigator is also available to families who seek out the service.

The FPC-IHS Blended In-Person and Online Pre-Service Training for Resource Parents combines four in-person classroom sessions with ten self-paced online training courses from FosterParentCollege.com (FPC). The classroom sessions are used to present local/state information or required training, conduct group activities, and allow the agency and prospective resource parent to assess whether a child should join their family. The interactive online courses, viewed independently, are provided in three clusters that cover core resource parent training and serve as a gateway to treatment foster care:

• Online Course Cluster 1: The Child Welfare Team, Child Abuse and Neglect, Parent-Child Attachment, and Understanding Behavior in Foster Children
• Online Course Cluster 2: Child Development, Cultural Issues in Parenting, and Working Together with Primary Families
• Online Course Cluster 3: Caring for Children Who Have Been Sexually Abused, Reducing Family Stress, and Foster Care to Adoption

OTWH is a 12–14 month reunification program developed to address the transition needs of middle and high school youths with, or at-risk of, emotional and behavioral disorders who are reintegrating into the home and community school settings following a stay in residential care. The program modifies and integrates three interventions: Check & Connect, Common Sense Parenting, and homework support to address the educational and family-based transition challenges most common for school-aged youths. Services are provided by a trained OTWH Consultant in the family home, school, and community, and primary objectives are to promote youth home stability and prevent school dropout. On average, families engage in 2 hours of direct service hours per week and consultants carry caseloads of up to 15 families. Training is manualized, service decisions are guided by weekly data analysis, and consultants are supervised in weekly individual and group consultation.