CWLA’s 2024 National Conference, Creating Meaningful Change, will be held April 17-19, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Using CWLA’s recently released whitepaper, Creating a High-Quality, Humane, and Respectful Approach to Advance Our Vision, and the CWLA National Blueprint for Excellence in Child Welfare as guides, this conference will highlight successful strategies for enhancing child and family well-being.
There is no single solution to the challenges facing families today. As noted in CWLA’s whitepaper: “Society’s commitment to child and family well-being must be demonstrated by establishing and sustaining a well-being system that includes a well-resourced safety net of services and supports that provide financial, housing, education, employment, food, and medical care to promote child and family health, stability, and self-sufficiency.” CWLA’s conference will bring together solutions from all sectors of child welfare and its related systems, furthering the shift toward an integrated, accessible, culturally responsive services continuum that advances family and community well-being.
Presentation topic areas will include:
- Partnerships across systems, states/counties, and within communities that have successfully eradicated barriers to support and enhanced child and family well-being
- Innovative approaches to service delivery, with strategies and lessons that speak directly to and can be implemented by frontline staff members
- Effective methods of increasing workforce recruitment, development, and retention, and addressing secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, including for resource parents and parent advocates
- Successful strategies to understand and promote equity, cultural humility, and strong racial, cultural, and ethnic identity
- Efforts to improve services for specific populations, including immigrants, LGBTQ+ children and resource parents, Latino families, and families in rural areas
- Lessons learned from the implementation of the Families First Prevention Services Act
- Successful applications of research, evaluation, data, and CQI in programs and organizations
- Strategies for supporting children and families impacted by mental health or substance misuse
- Successful efforts to expand access to mental health treatment through Medicaid and other health systems
- Efforts to rethink front-end services, including working differently with parents, families, and communities and improving the use of mandated reporters
- Effective strategies and practices that strengthen families, including:
o Prevention of and interventions for children coming into care
o Strategies for permanency, including reunification, kinship care, guardianship, and adoption
o Post-adoption supports and services
o Engaging resource parents and kinship caregivers in supporting children and their birth parents
o Addressing poverty and other social determinants of health, including responding to the concrete needs of children and families
Contact CWLA2024@cwla.org with questions.