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Webinars
The 2020 National Adoption Month webinar, Engage Youth: Listen and Learn, offers insights from youth and professionals about how to authentically engage and partner with young people. Additionally, the Children’s Bureau, in collaboration with the Capacity Building Center for States and AdoptUSKids, offered two webinars this summer, Authentic Youth Engagement and Empowerment and Engaging Youth in Creating Strengths-Based Recruitment Profiles, to support the Adoption Call-to-Action efforts on youth engagement.
2020 National Adoption Month Webinar
Engage Youth: Listen and Learn
- National Adoption Month: Engage Youth: Listen and Learn [Video] (September 30, 2020)
The theme for the National Adoption Month 2020 initiative is “Engage Youth: Listen and Learn.” During this 90-minute webinar, professionals and young people who have experienced care:
- Share insights on how to successfully engage and partner with youth
- Take youth engagement from abstract to concrete and describe how to incorporate youth voice into practice
- Discuss how to authentically listen to and engage young people
- Provide information about resources and materials available from Child Welfare Information Gateway, AdoptUSKids, and Children’s Bureau grantees
The webinar was developed through a collaboration between Child Welfare Information Gateway and AdoptUSKids on behalf of the Children’s Bureau.
2020 Adoption Call-to-Action Webinars
Adoption Call to Action: Authentic Youth Engagement and Empowerment
Audio Described Version
"Adoption Call to Action Webinar: Authentic Youth Engagement and Empowerment"
This webinar focused on key strategies for engaging and empowering youth of various ages in promoting and pursuing permanency for themselves as well as for other youth in foster care. Presenters highlighted key principles and considerations for implementing and sustaining youth engagement and empowerment practices, including ways to prepare and support youth to help them be involved in their own permanency planning, in broader child welfare system permanency efforts, or both.
Engaging Youth in Creating Strengths-Based Recruitment Profiles
In this 90-minute AdoptUSKids webinar, presenters shared strategies to help professionals engage youth in creating effective, strengths-based profiles. This webinar is intended for professionals who have prior exposure to the AdoptUSKids narrative-writing guidance.
"When I felt that I had someone who was supporting me and took the time to get to know me, I became interested in my own case."—Sarah
“It important that the youth is able to speak first in any type of planning meeting. Listen to and be supportive of what the youth wants.” —Jasmine
"If you can get a youth involved in just one advocacy activity, please do it. Once you plant the seed that they can use their voice to speak for themselves or others, it will continue to grow."—Sarah
Listen and learn more: Voices of Youth Narratives and Voices of Youth Videos
