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From Passenger to Pilot

Presentation: September 14, 2023

This short video examines the trauma, loss and powerlessness children and youth experience in the child welfare system, from their perspective. It explores some of the deep feelings and emotions experienced when children and youth no longer have a voice or control of where their journey is headed.  It examines the potential impact of authentic engagement and listening to their voice, so that children and youth feel they are being heard and that they are in control of their own future.

Courtroom, gravel, law book

Four Ways That Courts Can Actively Engage Children and Youth Involved in Child Welfare Proceedings

Children and youth are the experts on their own lives, but often they are not engaged meaningfully in their child welfare cases by court professionals. The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) has helped the QIC-EY identify four ways that all judges, court professionals, and related agencies involved with juvenile, family, and domestic violence cases can ensure that children and youth feel empowered and have a voice and a choice about their futures.

Learn more about the NCJFCJ Document

Connections are very dynamic as you can have close connections with siblings who are now adopted and not legally related to you, to children/youth you lived with in a group home, previous foster families, etc. All of these relationships need to be maintained.  The system should help support children/youth to keep all the people in their wheel.

Need to ensure all conversations include cultural and relational permanency and not just legal permanency.  Also need to start permanency at the very beginning which means keeping the children/youth connected to their family and others that are important to them.  Need to help them build and continue connections and not break them and then later when looking for permanency ask them to help find these people again.

I feel that the child welfare system sees family in a very generic way.  Need to really broaden this definition because a family is not always one or two adults.  It could be a group of people who care about each other.  Some children/youth are not going to be part of a traditional family but do need to have adults/elders who are there to support and mentor them.

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This website is supported by grant number 90CO1142. This website is supported by the Administration for Children & Families (ACF) of the United States (U.S.) Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $5,000,000 million with 100 percent funded by ACF/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, ACF/HHS or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit the ACF website, Administrative and National Policy Requirements, at https://www.acf.hhs.gov/administrative-and-national-policy-requirements.

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