Calendar

Traumatic events can happen to us at any age. When children and teens got through traumatic events that lead to PTSD, their reactions may be different from adults. Learn how to recognize PTSD symptoms in your child or teen.

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Description: In this session, participants will learn that sibling aggression is the most common form of family violence, but it is often minimized or dismissed. The first part of the session will focus on knowledge building. Participants will learn about four types of sibling aggression and abuse: physical, psychological, property, and sexual. A classification of sibling dynamics will be presented, distinguishing sibling rivalry and conflict from sibling aggression and abuse. Research will be presented showing that despite being viewed as harmless, sibling aggression is associated with negative impacts on mental and physical health and interpersonal relationships across the lifespan—and should be considered an adverse childhood experience. The second part of the session will focus on screening, intervention, and treatment. Strategies to help manage sibling conflict, aggression, and abuse will be reviewed. Case examples and excerpts from survivor narratives will be infused throughout the presentation.
Learning objectives:

1. Participants will learn about the prevalence of sibling aggression and abuse, variation in experiences among diverse groups, and impacts on mental and physical health and interpersonal relationships across the lifespan.
2. Participants will be able to explain cultural and institutional factors that make it difficult for children, parents, and professionals to recognize and respond to sibling aggression and abuse.
3. Participants will learn best practices to detect, address, and prevent sibling aggression and abuse to protect children and help survivors heal.

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Promoting Positive Change in Communities by Confronting Poverty

Louisiana CASA is excited to host our third webinar series. This series is brought to you in partnership with the Louisiana Children’s Trust Fund so we are required to ask participants certain demographic questions during registration. Once you register, an email will be sent to you that includes the link to join the webinar. We hope to see you there!

Youth Trauma and Resilience in Poverty

There are unique challenges faced by young individuals growing up in impoverished environments. From exposure to violence to systemic inequalities, this presentation will examine how poverty shapes their experiences and how, despite adversity, many youth demonstrate remarkable resilience. Our presenters will explore protective factors, coping strategies, and community support that contribute to their ability to thrive.

SPEAKER

Dr. Loria Hudson founded Transformations Wellness Center, LLC, and Children Are People Too, a nonprofit organization. She has been educating couples, helping families for over 20 years, and advocating for families, relationships, and marriages. Her work has helped countless couples and families overcome challenges and build stronger, more resilient relationships with themselves and others, leading to a more compassionate and understanding world. Dr. Hudson’s other body of work stems from seeing clients from ages 7 – 70 in Monroe, Louisiana, providing Mental Health Services, assisting Louisiana Center Against Poverty, which is established in Lake Providence and Monroe, Louisiana, teaching young girls ages 9-17 in Louisiana (Girl Power!), a prevention and intervention social change program that promotes positive behavior, enhances social skills, and improves academic performance. In addition to teaching males and females ages 8-17 Life Skills and COPE to help increase their self-esteem, develop healthy attitudes, and enhance their knowledge of essential life skills – all of which promote healthy and positive personal development. As a mental health professional, educator, author, Certified Life Coach, and licensed minister, Dr. Hudson holds a PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy specializing in couple therapy and a master’s in clinical Mental Health specializing in Substance Abuse. Thanks to these skills, she developed tools that have changed all areas of her work. She continues to help transform people’s lives and resides in Monroe, LA, with her husband of over 26 years and one daughter and son. Together, they have five daughters and one son. Dr. Hudson’s practical solutions to real-life issues have a captivating appeal that captures listeners. Her motto is “To Thine Own Self Be True,” which helped build her marriage.

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What does it mean to be “color brave?” In her TED talk “Color blind or color brave?”, accomplished businesswoman Mellody Hobson explores having candid conversations about race that can help us better understand each other’s perspectives and experiences. Gaining this information is at the heart of our ability to build authentic relationships and to attain cultural dexterity. One strategy for achieving this bravery is through cultural humility, which has been defined as the ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented in relation to aspects of cultural identity as defined by that person. Cultural humility challenges us to suspend what we know, or think we know, about a person based on generalizations about their culture. This two-part training session will also discuss the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system. We will offer participants an opportunity to be reflective and introspective about how they manage race relations in their professional and personal lives in hopes of equipping them with tools they can use to better understand and serve the families that they encounter.

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This presentation examines the complex, nonlinear, and understudied relationship between maternal employment and unemployment, and patterns of employment and unemployment, and four types of child maltreatment. We describe the employment status and often nonstandard employment patterns of high-risk mothers at three child developmental ages and apply the results in the context of three theories used in extant research to understand the relationship between economic hardship and child maltreatment. We find that both too much and not enough paid employment are associated with increased risk for child maltreatment, and neglect in particular. Our findings indicate that income-support programs tied to employment maybe ineffective mechanisms for many families to balance time and money, key factors in the prevention of child maltreatment. As policy makers seek new approaches to prevent child maltreatment with a renewed focus on the role of poverty, researchers, policymakers, and clinicians must understand and consider the employment patterns of at-risk mothers as they seek to develop and implement new concrete supports for families.

CWLA is inviting non-profit leaders and your key leadership staff to participate in this two-hour session, Assessing Our Capacity for Family Support and Prevention Programming, scheduled for Thursday, February 6 from 1:00 – 3:00 pm Eastern. To gain the most benefit from this interactive session, please make sure that you register as a team of at least 2 but not more than 4 persons. You will have the opportunity to work in breakout sessions with your team. There is limited capacity so please register early.

About the Session: There are a myriad of unique challenges and opportunities related to the development of family support and primary prevention programming for non-profit child welfare agencies. Many jurisdictions have been exploring a variety of approaches that prioritize more accessible, non-stigmatizing, and common-sense approaches to service delivery. There is a renewed emphasis on family engagement and involvement as agencies are being encouraged to collaborate with a wider range of community partners.

Non-profit child welfare agencies, especially those with long histories of providing deeper end services to children and families, are rethinking their purpose and the programs to align themselves more closely with public policy and the best practices related to family support and primary prevention. For many of these agencies, this is easier said than done and the practical reality of implementation can be daunting for an organization, its Board, its leadership team, and its frontline team practitioners. The adaptive and organizational culture changes are transformational but there is no established road map for how provider agencies might best achieve their goals.

This two-hour session will be a primer that frames the useful and practical questions on the road to redesign. The content will take participants beyond slogans and big picture themes and will emphasize a more detailed and operational approach to the task of redesigning an agency’s programs and practices.

The session will focus on The 7 P’s Exercise, which was developed by CWLA Senior Fellow, Paul DiLorenzo, during his thirty-five years plus of planning, developing, implementing, and managing community and neighborhood-based family support programming. Participants will be able to use the framework as a way of organizing their agency redesign journey. It is meant to make the planning process simple and straightforward. Though not meant to be an all-inclusive process, The 7 P’s Exercise will help an agency team create a “To Do” list for transformation, and at the same time, highlight existing strengths and opportunities that a provider might not have considered in their desire to become more primary prevention oriented.

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Child welfare system responses to families experiencing domestic violence (DV) and child maltreatment are based largely on the premise that children need to be rescued from the parent(s) who have “failed to protect” them. This understanding of the problem justifies “solutions” such as surveillance of families and mandated reporting, family separation, and coercive service and treatment plans. Well-documented race, class, and gender inequities are inherent in child welfare and its intersections with the criminal legal system, juvenile justice, immigration, and other systems of carceral control.

Given the history of child welfare and current mindsets and practices, it can be difficult to envision possibilities for transformation toward what many people around the U.S. are calling for – a child and family well-being system in which ALL children and families are valued. Yet some organizations are successfully re-imagining the system landscape and actualizing new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing! In this critical conversation, leaders from Safe & Sound, the Young Women’s Freedom Center, and Futures Without Violence will share their learnings.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s prompted educators and health and human services professionals to develop cultural competence. The belief was, if the mostly white practitioners increased their knowledge of diverse racial and ethnic groups’ values and customs, they could improve the delivery of services to diverse populations. While cultural competence was a step in the right direction, it inadvertently reinforced and created stereotypes about cultural practices and experiences that fell short of achieving its goal of supporting culturally sensitive service delivery.

In this two-part training session, participants will learn the importance of cultural humility: suspending cultural assumptions and, instead, embracing individuals’ personal definitions and expressions of culture. Participants will explore cultural humility by defining their own personal culture using a myriad of identity factors (e.g., skin color, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and ability) and determining whether those identity factors place them in privileged or marginalized groups, or both. They will learn how the intersections of various identity factors create a unique cultural experience for every individual and how these intersections result in systemic power differentials and complex experiences of oppression. Finally, they will apply their cultural identity to the framework of the Cage of Oppression and, using the example of lookism, evaluate how existing power structures impact their lives and the lives of those they serve. By recognizing the societal effects of intersectionality, participants will be challenged to incorporate cultural humility in their personal and professional interactions.

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Although race is merely a social construct, it has fractured American society for centuries. Race has been the impetus for war, both historically on the battlefield and, in more recent times, on the streets of America and around the globe. Do we really understand the power race holds while being only an illusion? Moreover, what trauma is caused by race and its influence on laws, policies and individual behaviors? This three-hour training session begins the critical conversation about the intersection between race and trauma, and its impact on us as individuals and collectively.

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