Foster Care Training

This presentation will introduce transracial adoption and allow participants to better understand the experience and process of transracial adoption and its impact on youth and families. Families adopting transracially are often told that love will be enough and a 30-minute video or one-day workshop about transracial adoption will prepare them for a life time of parenting across race. While some change is happening and more talk about race is occurring, too many professionals are continuing their work with a color-blind approach and therefore not appropriately evaluating, educating or supporting their families in transracial adoption.

Participants will increase their ability to assess, educate and support pre-adoptive families considering transracial adoption and families already parenting across racial lines. Specific approaches about how to talk about race and how the race of the trainer impacts those discussions will be explored. Participants will be able to clinically conceptualize the impact of race and adoption on the lives of adoptees and adoptive parents. Participants will improve their understanding of the intersectionality of race and adoption and how adoptees feel, think and process at different stages of their lives. Pact’s Building Community Across Cultures program will be shared during this process allowing participants to understand specific and tangible steps and processes they can use to better evaluate, support and prepare pre-adoptive and adoptive families in transracial adoption.

Training Objectives: Participants will be able to:

• Explain how race matters in adoption.
• List and describe the four current racial tensions in the world: the internalized, the institutional, the interpersonal and the structural.
• Summarize general clinical issues to consider when working with pre-adoptive and adoptive transracial families and the ways that privilege and race may be contributing to or exacerbating parenting practices.
• Prepare to support and advocate for their families by learning and reviewing the federally-approved transracial education program provided by Pact, An Adoption Alliance: Building Community Across Cultures.
• Describe the intersectionality of race, adoption and class and how it affects pre-adoptive and adoptive transracial families.
• Feel more confident in providing effective, sensitive, adoption and race-competent services to families and clients.

MORE INFO AND TO REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/transracial-adoption-registration-90413672729