CREATING A FAMILY

Creating a Family's Interactive Training and Support Curriculum for Foster, Adoptive & Kinship Families was designed to make it easy for organizations to run engaging, high-quality support groups (in-person or online). Our curriculum is a turnkey resource developed to help facilitators provide support and training while building community, reducing caregiver stress, and helping caregivers feel more confident in parenting children exposed to trauma. In 2020, Creating a Family worked to create, pilot and test the new Interactive Training & Support for Foster/Adoptive/Kinship Families Subscription Service. Ten curricula were developed in 2020 and offered to the public in 2021. During 2021 an additional 10 curricula were developed. In 2022, 5 more curricula were developed. In 2023 we launched a new website to house our Curriculum, making it more accessible and user friendly to organizations running support groups for foster, adoptive and kinship families. The Interactive Training & Support Curricula provides resources and wraparound services with the goal of increasing the number of parent support groups available to families by making it easier to facilitate and maintain high-quality groups where parents develop social connections, reduce stress, and feel more confident in parenting children exposed to trauma. Each curriculum includes a video, facilitator guide, and handouts. The wraparound subscription service has initial facilitator training for online or in-person groups, access to participant evaluations, and access to a curriculum library that includes 25 topics for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents. During 2023, 495 curricula were utilized by 47 organizations.

In 2023, Creating a Family continued to develop the Prenatal Exposure Training for Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Parents. This training is designed to help participants recognize children who may have been impacted by prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs and trains them on best practices for working with these children and youth to help them thrive. The training was delivered over three sessions and includes a video with embedded video interviews with experts from UNC's Knowles Center for Alcohol Studies, Duke University School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, the Fullerton Genetics Center, and foster parents with lived experience raising children with prenatal substance exposure. Further, the videos included animated videos that we created to help explain and animate complex concepts. The training was piloted with two additional randomized control studies and presented online. The piloted training was delivered by a staff facilitator and included group discussion for each session. Participants had access to an online resource library to reference further materials on topics presented during the training, including diagnosis, strategies, and further resources. The training is designed to be delivered either in-person or online. We continue to work with NC State University to evaluate the training through two additional Randomized Control Trials delivered online. In late 2023, the training was updated from three videos to five videos. We expanded the session three video into three age-specific sessions for parents, including birth to age four, age four to age eleven, and age eleven to young adults. These new sessions allow participants to spend more time discussing strategies to support children in these age groups. Finally, in November 2023, we conducted listening sessions with several North Carolina Department of Social Service staff across the state to determine their needs around training child welfare workers on prenatal substance exposure.