Professional Development Trainings
Invest in your staff to build their skillset and enhance their capacity to engage parents in strengthening families. Join us at one of the opportunities below.
Be Strong Families workshops, trainings, and technical assistance go beyond traditional child- and family-service models. We customize our curricula for your needs and come to you — either in-person or online, for groups of up to 30 people.
Our curricula are always strengths-based, family-centered, and trauma-informed. We aim to strengthen both staff and parents from the inside out and promote the parallel process essential to effective work with families. We offer a range of workshops and trainings, each centered around our overall mission to provide transformative conversations that nurture the spirit of family, promote well-being, and prevent violence.
Nurturing the Spirit of Family: Supporting and strengthening families is one of our main purposes at Be Strong Families. We work with programs and systems to improve their parent engagement practices by enhancing research-based Protective Factors, building community, mobilizing mutual assistance, and strengthening parenting skills.
Promoting Well-being: Strong families require individual vitality! Holistic personal development is a cornerstone of Be Strong Families’ work—physical, mental/emotional, social, financial, environmental, and spiritual aspects. We specialize in mobilizing families and communities to support recovery and healing from grief, trauma, and loss.
Preventing Violence: Be Strong Families began by working to reduce violence within the home by building Protective Factors because strong families are critical for strong and safe communities. We have branched out over the years to include promoting peace and justice in communities and transforming conflict as main programmatic emphases.
Trainings by Category
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
Parent Engagement
Experience exercises and discussions that empower your engagement with the parents you serve.
Family Support
Learn and build skills to raise healthy, balanced children who have the resources to reach their full potential.
Healing Trauma
Understand trauma-informed practices at a deeper lever that fully enables you to support the well-being of families.
Youth Development
Build and develop your goals to inspire and motivate youth to live their best lives and reach their fullest potential.
Self-Care & Skill-Building
Gain the knowledge and supplemental skills you need to mobilize positive change and strong client relationships.
Parent Engagement Trainings
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
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Format: In-person, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood professionals
Effective work with families depends on staff’s ability to engage and partner with them. Utilizing an extended role-play format, this experiential workshop for professionals assists practitioners with developing empathy for their clients and in-depth understanding of the challenges they face. It encourages self-reflection as a foundation for strengthening parent engagement skills. Be Strong Families works with practitioners to customize this workshop for their program’s needs and the specific situations of their clients.
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Format: Online, two 4-hour half-days *OR In-person, 8 hours (1 full-day or 2 half-days)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood professionals
This hands-on, activity-based, experiential workshop builds family-serving staff members’ parent engagement skills. Participants also increase their understanding of how their personal attitudes and professional practices contribute to or undermine positive partnerships with parents. Promoting positive outcomes for children is best achieved when the whole family is accepted and supported in an approach that strengthens the family.
Recognizing the parent-child bond as the first, most important relationship in a child’s life, it is essential to have strong, positive relationships with the whole family-including fathers. Having such relationships allows for programs to implement programs that value principles of family-centered practice. This training promotes awareness of the importance of developing skills in building relationships with families through a variety of reflective and interactive activities.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
Being able to recognize when a family needs support is important, but whether they get what they need is often impacted by how we, as service providers, communicate with them. This interactive workshop assists participants with understanding why certain conversations are difficult and how they could become less so. Participants will practice effective communication skills and develop action plans for implementing them with parents.
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Format: Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
How do good family service programs evolve into great, beloved community resources? How can family-serving programs embody servant leadership and work toward social justice in their everyday activities? Part of the answer lies in how they engage families. In this four-hour workshop, participants will build upon their strengths in developing and nurturing positive, healing relationships between providers and parents, explore the barriers they are encountering, and design practical solutions for overcoming these barriers. They will learn about how attending concretely to multiple dimensions of equity (political, social, economic) in everyday program practices can enhance their greatness. By better understanding how power dynamics and implicit biases can get in the way of forming working partnerships, participants will enhance their effectiveness in designing and implementing actionable, co-creative strategies for inclusive budgeting, governing, and planning with parents.
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Format: Online, two 4-hour half-days *OR In-person, 8 hours (1 full-day or 2 half-days)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood professionals, and other helping professions.
Everyone needs help at times, and when relevant assistance and resources come at the right time, it can be lifesaving. In this workshop, the interactions between providers and their clients are built upon creating an authentic relationship. An emphasis is put not on simply having providers know the ins and outs of Information and Referral Services (I&R) to pass along to clients, but rather on implementing a partnership-based approach to I&R that empowers clients to determine their own wants and needs, find answers, and access resources.
This workshop hosts many learning objectives, including understanding what relationship-based practice means and how and why it’s important to making effective referrals, brainstorming barriers, and solutions to making effective referrals, recognizing how to leverage relationships with providers to assist families with building meaningful connections, and more!
Family Support Trainings
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals Only
Be Strong Families has worked (and is working) with former parents with child welfare involvement to develop resources that support parents whose children are in the foster care system in getting their kids back and keeping them safely at home. In this workshop, staff will learn about the Get on the Fast Track workshop and group support that they can make available to their clients and the benefits that parents report on participating in the workshop.
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Format: Online OR In-person, 8 hours (1 full-day or 2 half-days)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
Prerequisite: Living the Protective Factors: Journey to Being a Tight, Loving, and Fabulously Strong Family
This workshop for providers builds on the core Living the Protective Factors: Journey to Being a Tight, Loving, and Fabulously Strong Family (below). It assists professionals with applying their knowledge of the five Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors in their work with families while simultaneously enhancing meaningful parent engagement. Participants surface the myriad ways that they are currently assisting families with building Protective Factors. They will learn how and why it’s beneficial for the Protective Factors to serve as an action framework for parenting, as well as a common language between parents and providers, and how Protective Factors can be mobilized by parents to prevent ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences / trauma) for their children. Participants will leave with ideas that they can implement immediately upon their return and with a reinvigorated and expanded appreciation for the power of the Protective Factors.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 10 hours: 1 introduction (4 hours) and 4 sessions (1.5 hours each)
Audience: Parents with Child Welfare Involvement
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare Professionals (this is a direct service workshop, and can also be a training-of-trainers)
Get on the Fast Track is an experiential education and support series that provides practical tools and strategies for parents with child welfare involvement to reunify their families. It begins with a 4-hour highly experiential and psychodynamic workshop that surfaces, validates, and then temporarily neutralizes negative emotions related to being involved with the child welfare system. After acknowledging the stress that is inherent in the process, participants brainstorm positive and negative ways to handle the stress. The last hour of the workshop is devoted to an empowerment-based method for parents to take control of their destiny and their struggle to get their children back at home. The 3-S concept (Strategy–Strength–Support) is shared. Parents gain practical knowledge, insight, and conviction about their potential to effectively lead the reunification process. All participants receive Be Strong Families’ publication the Get Real Guide to Getting Your Kids Back.
There are four follow-up or stand-alone 1.5-hour supportive workshops on the following topics:
Social Connections
Caseworker Relationship
Visitation
Relationship with the Caregiver
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Format: Online OR In-person, 8 hours (1 full-day or 2 half-days)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
This workshop gives participants the opportunity to “test-drive” the five research-based Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors that are proven to keep children safe and families strong.
Highly interactive, fun, and informative- the workshop begins with understanding the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACES) and introduces the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors framework as an important component of a comprehensive wellbeing paradigm and links the framework to trauma-informed practice, demonstrating its practical benefits for bridging communications between staff, families, courts, and other service providers. This workshop is customized with and for the jurisdiction/organization in which it will be provided so that it is maximally relevant for participants.
For both parents and providers, this workshop results in participants having practical insight and strategies for overcoming obstacles and strengthening your own family-from the inside out.
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Format: 2 hours per session per week, 16 hours total
Audience: Parents Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood audience
This 8-week parent education series is based on the Living the Protective Factors Playbook which contains 49 days of activities and weekly themes for parents to learn about, explore, and build the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors at home. Every week for two hours, parents come together in a fun, inspirational and educational environment to share their experiences and weekly Playbook homework, learn from one another, gain insight from the group and the group leader, feel supported in their parenting, expand their repertoire of parenting strategies, and gain a deeper understanding of what gets in the way of being a strong, loving family-including childhood trauma.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals and Providers Organizations
Navigating the child welfare system is difficult for any parent and doing the work to get one’s children returned home is a monumental feat. When reunification is the permanency goal, maintaining strong family ties while the child is out of their parents’ home is essential. Child welfare staff can do a lot to facilitate the process of maintaining family connectedness. This four-hour workshop highlights the importance of maintaining family connectedness and assists child welfare front line staff with understanding how they can strengthen family ties throughout the life of a case.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
Responding to signs of child abuse and neglect is crucial—and research now allows us to start earlier in keeping children safe and families strong. By recognizing and responding to early signs of stress, family-serving staff can assist families with getting the support they need to promote the health and well-being of their family and prevent abuse and neglect. This training will support participants getting in touch with their own stress and help them recognize early signs of family stress.
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Format: Online OR In-person, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
Toxic stress takes a toll on all family members. Well-meaning attempts to educate parents about the damaging impact of toxic stress on their children’s development can end up adding more pressure and shame to an overwhelming situation.
This interactive workshop—developed originally for the American Academy of Pediatrics—is different. We’ll cover the basics of toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, and trauma. The heart of this session is learning a strengths-based way to engage parents in building Protective Factors to reduce toxic stress. Updated to include discussion on pandemic-related toxic stress. Open to all who work with or are part of families experiencing high levels of stress.
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Format: In-person OR Online, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals Only
This workshop introduces child welfare staff to Be Strong Families’ Shared Parenting workshop for parents and caregivers. It also assists them with promoting healthy, meaningful working relationships and partnerships between parents and caregivers. The curriculum is also infused with strategies for effectively engaging parents and enhancing capacity to:
Find commonalities and promote harmony and collaboration between caregivers and parents
Practice communication skills for challenging conversations
Expand empathy and let go of judgment
Develop strategies to work together to benefit children in care
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Format: Online OR In-person, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: For Parents with Child Welfare Involvement and Caregivers
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare Professionals
This training brings parents with child welfare involvement and caregivers together, creating an opportunity to understand one another’s unique shared parenting role within the child welfare system with the goal of strengthening each participant individually and collectively as a team. This workshop allows parents to take a deeper dive into what does it mean to co-parent and respect each other to help the child.
Healing Trauma Trainings
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
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Format: Online 2 days X 4 hours (half-day each), OR In-person 8 hours (full-day)
Audience: All audiences
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood audience
Other people’s trauma impacts our well-being, regardless of whether the other people are our friends, clients, co-workers, or family members. Learning how vicarious trauma affects us is the first step to improving our well-being and ability to sustain positive relationships. This workshop begins with learning about and identifying our own signs of trauma exposure response and our emotional triggers. Participants practice strategies for de-escalating their own and others’ emotional responses in the moment. Further, they learn a framework for reading and shifting their own and others’ energy to move into a positive relational zone. This workshop offers tools for increasing awareness, skills, and tools for understanding how to best respond when trauma or trauma history is in play. The workshop concludes by making a self-care plan using the Be Strong Families Domains of Vitality so people can stay strong and attend to their relationships.
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Format: Online OR In-person, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals and Caregivers
Often when children are involved with child welfare, elements of their history can be lost due to a variety of reasons — including multiple placements. Lifebooks are an essential tool in trauma-informed parenting. This training is designed to assist participants with understanding the value of a Lifebook for a child in care and the ways in which the collaborative process of developing a Lifebook can promote psychological wellbeing and assist with maintaining positive family ties as well as partnerships between parents with child welfare involvement and caregivers.
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Format: Online OR In-person, 4 hours (half-day)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals Only
For child welfare staff who understand the basics of trauma-informed practice and the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors, this workshop takes that practice one step further. Participants explore how the concept of emotional safety contributes to transformation and healing and the importance of emotional safety as part of safety and wellbeing, transformative child welfare practice, and parenting. This training introduces participants to Appreciative Inquiry as an interviewing method that, along with the Protective Factors, can surface meaningful strengths to build on for family reunification. Participants use a case-study method, working from a sample case plan description, to create a strengths-based parent profile.
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Format: Online or In-Person, 16 hours
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals
Module 1: Using the Protective Factors to Overcome Challenges at Work (4‐hours)
The Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors are a powerful tool for keeping families strong and children safe, but they can also be deployed to solve almost any thorny problem or complex challenge. This module uses conversation technologies and interactive, experiential activities to surface issues that are sapping energy and causing frustration and burnout at work and then uses the Protective Factors to address them. Participants have an opportunity to re‐connect to their purpose and passion, feel supported by their colleagues, with more tools in their toolbox to thrive at work and in their work.
Module 2: Trauma‐Informed Supervisory Practice Part 1 (4‐hours)
Trauma impacts our wellbeing, whether the other people are our friends, our clients, our coworkers, or our family members. Learning how vicarious trauma affects us is the first step to improving our wellbeing and our ability to sustain positive relationships. This module begins with learning about and identifying our own signs of trauma exposure response and our emotional triggers. Supervisors practice strategies for de‐escalating their own and others’ emotional responses in the moment. Further, they learn a framework for reading and shifting their own and others’ energy to move into a positive relational zone. This module offers tools for increasing staff awareness, skills, and tools for understanding how to best respond when trauma or trauma history is in play. This module concludes by exploring the ways in which supervisory relationships can support a trauma‐responsive practice and how workers and supervisors can co‐create safe interpersonal space for reflection and skill‐building.
Module 3: Trauma‐Informed Supervisory Practice Part 2 (4‐hours)
This experiential module takes off from where Part 1 (Module 2) left off by assuming reflective supervisory practice and diving deeper into what concrete coaching skills may be effectively deployed in these conversations. While effective supervisors may naturally and intuitively mobilize these techniques without having explicitly learned them, this module makes the implicit explicit. Supervisors have the opportunity to both learn about and practice coaching skills such as: asking appreciative, empowering questions; clarifying; goal setting; reframing; planting a seed; celebrating; affirming; validating; championing; asking permission; and active listening. This module is highly interactive, energizing, playful, and maximizes participants' creativity.
Module 4: The Art of Trauma‐Informed, Relationship‐Based Engagement (4‐hours)
Effective work with others depends on the supervisor’s ability to engage and partner. Utilizing an extended role‐play format, this experiential module for supervisors assists practitioners with developing empathy for their staff and in‐depth understanding of the challenges they face. It encourages self‐reflection as a foundation for strengthening their staff engagement skills while practicing the skills learned in previous modules. Be Strong Families works with agencies to customize this module for their program’s needs and the specific situations of their staff.
Youth Development Trainings
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
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Format: Online OR In-person: half-day (4 hours)
Audience: Child Welfare Professionals Only
Targeted toward staff who work with youth in care, this workshop offers the YouthThrive™ Protective and Promotive Factors framework as a tool for thinking about, organizing, and enhancing their services. Through fun, interactive small-group work, professionals emphatically experience the YouthThrive™ Protective and Promotive factors. They also build critical thinking and human-centered design skills to their work with teenagers involved with child welfare. Participants explore how the stages of teenage development are impacted by trauma what it means to work with and help a teen; stages of development and how trauma impacts youth development are discussed.
Self-Care & Skill-Building Trainings
Only need to train a small group? Check out the Be Strong Families Institute for upcoming workshops.
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Format: Online OR In-person: 1 full-day (8 hours) or 2 half-days (4 hours each)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized version available for: Child Welfare Professionals
This training challenges workers to understand their own story within their work, helping them understand the elements of themselves that they bring into their practice. Participants will spend time examining and dealing with their own biases and triggers as well as exploring how to set appropriate boundaries with the families they serve—ensuring that they are recognizing their own limitations and supporting themselves through intentional self-care. Participants will learn how to use the five Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors to build a strength-based parent profile and to deepen the way they engage with the families they serve. Workers leave with tools they can immediately put into practice as an Agent of Positive Change.
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Format: Online OR In-person: 1 full-day (8 hours) or 2 half-days (4 hours each)
Audience: Providers Only
Customized versions available for: Child Welfare, Education, and Early Childhood Professionals
The Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors are a powerful tool for keeping families strong and children safe, but they can also be deployed to solve almost any thorny problem or complex challenge. This workshop uses Art of Hosting conversation technologies and interactive, experiential activities to surface issues that are sapping energy — causing frustration and burnout at work — and then uses the Protective Factors to address them. This workshop adds depth and dimension to the practice of Living the Protective Factors. Participants leave feeling re-connected to their purpose and passion, supported by their colleagues, and with more tools in their toolbox to thrive in their work with families.