RESOURCES
Knowledge that Drives Practice
The National Center connects systems, builds workforce capacity, and expands access to adoption competent mental health care so children, youth, and families can achieve greater stability, permanency, and well-being. By providing knowledge, training, practical tools, and resources, the National Center helps professionals apply adoption competent practices, strengthen child-serving systems, and improve outcomes for those they serve.
Recent Blog Posts
Stay informed about the issues shaping mental health and child welfare. Explore National Center blogs and resources featuring emerging research, promising practices, lived experience perspectives, and practical strategies for strengthening adoption competence.
Topics include child welfare and mental health collaboration, post-permanency mental health support, trauma-informed support for families, child welfare capacity building, and strategies for improving mental health access for children and families.
Webinar: Lived Experience Voices That Shape Care
Lived experience is more than a powerful story. It is essential expertise for building effective mental health systems. Highlights from the National Center’s webinar, Voices That Shape Care, demonstrate how youth, families, caregivers, and adoptees are helping shape permanency and adoption competent services, strengthen workforce development, and drive lasting systems change across states and communities.
Beyond Being Heard: How Youth Voice and Lived Experience Strengthen Systems of Care
Youth voice is more than being heard. Through personal experience and national research, this article explores how meaningful engagement and lived experience strengthen systems of care, improve outcomes, and help create pathways to permanency, belonging, and lifelong well-being for children and families.
Navajo Nation Launches Community Collaboration Initiative
Partners across the Navajo Nation are coming together to strengthen services for children, youth, and families. Learn how community collaboration is improving access to support and building stronger pathways to well-being.
Recent Webinars
Build knowledge and skills through the National Center webinars designed for child welfare professionals, mental health providers, leaders, parents, advocates, and partners.
Sessions explore adoption competent mental health training, cross-system workforce training, trauma-informed child-serving systems, family and youth engagement, and other topics affecting children and families.
Sustaining Ourselves While Serving Others
In Their Backpack: The Added Weight of Loss & Grief for Students in Adoptive, Foster, Kinship, and Guardianship Families
Upcoming Events
Find out where the National Center will present, exhibit, and connect with partners nationwide. Conferences offer opportunities to share emerging practices, strengthen professional networks, and advance conversations about adoption competent mental health and child welfare collaboration.
Zero to Three LEARN Conference
Oct. 27-29, 2026
Join us in Portland, OR, along with everyone supporting infants, toddlers, and families — educators, healthcare providers, mental health professionals, researchers, advocates, and policymakers.
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