Training

The Child Welfare Partnership’s team of professional trainers offers all training for incoming public child welfare staff, as well as advanced and supervisory training and for caregivers (foster, adopt, and relative parents). For more information about these programs, go to the Child Welfare Partnership programs.

The Center’s training programs expand the Partnership’s reach to other instructional topics and communities. These training programs include grant-funded projects and contracts with specific agencies and initiatives. Current projects include the Rural Child Welfare Training Program, Wraparound Oregon – Cross-systems Training Academy, Children’s Justice Act Systems Training, and Children’s Justice Act/Juvenile Rights Project Teen Training.

Rural Child Welfare Training Program

With the support of a grant from the Federal Children's Bureau, this five-year project offers training, research and distance learning to support and celebrate child welfare practice in rural, tribal, and village settings in rural Oregon and Alaska.

The four project areas are:

"In Celebration of Rural Practice" - A three-day rural child welfare training program offered yearly in Oregon and Alaska. Customizable to local culture and practice, a curriculum of this training will be available for dissemination in 2008.
Distance Learning for Rural Areas - Travel costs can reduce access to training in rural areas. This project has developed a variety of distance learning projects and approaches
Indian Child Welfare Training - This project increases access to a variety of training programs to increase knowledge of Indian Child Welfare for state and tribal child welfare workers in both states.
Infusion of rural content into existing training - Development of curriculum materials to help infuse rural case examples and awareness into core trainings

All project activities are evaluated. A research project on rural workforce and workplace issues is planned for Year 5.

For more information, see the Rural Training Grant website at http://www.rtg.pdx.edu.

Wraparound Oregon – Cross-systems Training Academy

Wraparound Oregon is an initiative designed to build a coordinated system of services for children and youth with complex mental health needs and their families. All programs in the initiative follow the principles of the National Wraparound Initiative (http://www.rtc.pdx.edu/nwi/)
Three projects currently operate under the Wraparound Oregon umbrella:

The school-aged youth project, funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to serve 25 youth at a time who face serious mental illness and are involved in multiple systems;
The court collaboration project, funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, designed to demonstrate the leveraging power of one juvenile court judge to promote collaboration; and
The Early Childhood project, one of few SAMSHA funded system of care projects designed to wrap planning around very young children with mental health challenges, based at Multnomah Education Service District.

The Center operates a cross-systems training academy for all programs. Staff coordinate a series of training and consultation services designed to promote sustainable systems changes across child welfare, mental health, education, juvenile justice, and other systems serving children with severe mental illness and their families. While some trainings are reserved for staff working directly on Wraparound Oregon, most are open to and offered collaboratively by the wider community.

For more information, contact: Katharine Cahn (cahnk@pdx.edu) or Sandy Bumpus (bumpus@pdx.edu), or look up the training website at: http://wraparoundoregon.org/training.htm

Children’s Justice Act Systems Training

The Oregon Children’s Justice Act task force has provided grant funds to the Center to offer training on child maltreatment (with an emphasis on adolescents) to people from a variety of disciplines. The project has three components:

Training for Judicial Officers across Oregon on child protection for teens with co-occurring disorders (completed, August, 2006)
Cross – systems training and action planning on collaboration between adult probation and parole and the dependency system (to be delivered in 2007)
Research on how training is delivered to medical professionals and consultation with the Children’s Justice Act Task force on improving training for medical professionals (summer, 2007).

Funded by federal training dollars from the Children’s Justice Act, administered by a multi-disciplinary task force staffed and managed by the state Department of Human Services. Project ends September, 2007.

For more information, contact Katharine Cahn (cahnk@pdx.edu) , Marty Lowrey (mlowrey@chemeketa.edu) or Melanie Sage (melaniesage@gmail.com).

Children’s Justice Act / Juvenile Rights Project Teen Training

The overall purpose of this grant is to increase the quality and timeliness of the protective response to teenaged youth who are victims of abuse or neglect, or at risk of being abused or neglected.

The Juvenile Rights Project provides overall coordination of the project, and Center trainers offer expertise on how to design training, focus group facilitation with teens, and content analysis of model training curricula collected from around the country. Specific tasks will include:

Collaborate on the development of a training curriculum (including development of content, structure, and appropriate delivery methods) for a variety of Oregon professionals regarding child safety with teen agers
Collaborate on the design of a recommended training dissemination method suitable to each selected profession
Collaborate on the provision of a training for trainers drawn from each selected professional group

This project operates in partnership with the Juvenile Rights Project, funded by federal training dollars from the Children’s Justice Act administered by a multi-disciplinary task force staffed and managed by the state Department of Human Services. The project ends September, 2007.

For more information, contact Katharine Cahn (cahnk@pdx.edu), Marty Lowrey (mlowrey@chemeketa.edu), Karen Moorhead (KMoorhead@chemeketa.edu), Troy Lakey (tlakey@chemeketa.edu), or Melanie Sage (melaniesage@gmail.com).