Connecting Families

This 4-day, highly interactive Connecting Families training is an adapted version of Kevin Campbell’s Family Finding, Family Seeing model and is intended as a collection of tools, strategies, and materials to support professionals in their efforts to strengthen broken connections between youth, family, and community.  The Family Finding, Family Seeing model acknowledges the critical importance of parents, relatives, and other caring people within a child or young person’s life; and that they are key agents of change.

Help your agency build a culture of having children connected to the people they love, and those who love the child; the people who will be there for the Youth, well beyond their time in care. Having children in the care system connected to their ‘free and forever network’, alongside those key relationships built during their short time in care; positively impacts a child regarding their relational safety and health, identity, health, lifelong belonging and most importantly – their lifespan.

Practitioners will be equipped with tools and skills to interact with youth and family that ensures family are left feeling as though they are important in the life of their child, and that the child becomes genuinely connected to their free and forever network. This training does not look for placement, it looks for relationships and identity building of youth we all care for, and that a child’s wellbeing is significantly increased when we do so.

This highly interactive Connecting Families training has been described as "Outstanding training!” and “Everyone should do this, it's time to change!"

Participants will be able to:

• Understand and work within Kevin Campbell’s Family Finding, Family seeing model and principles
• Understand and utilise search strategies and tools to find free and forever networks
• Gain the best from birth family and their network, positively impacting the child
• Understand and utilise the ‘Blended perspectives meeting’ (gaining your youths greatest unmet need – having the network decision make/plan how to best support that)
• Understand and work more sophisticatedly within power imbalances between agency, practitioner and network
• See family and the network from a position of strengths and resilience
• Re-establish practitioner motivation and obtain a strengthened level of advocacy regarding ‘justice doing and family seeing’