Systemic Transformation in Child Welfare

I am the foster care program manager at EVOLVE Family Services. We do home study assessments and license both traditional and kinship foster providers as well as provide post-placement support. Our agency also does work in adoption and permanency, youth services, and pregnancy services. I am a transracial and transnational adoptee. I have previously held roles in supervised parenting, domestic violence case management and advocacy, and psychotherapy.

Address:
5850 Omaha Ave. N.
Stillwater, MN 55082

Hi! I am Teresa, a clinical social worker who is passionate about supporting adoptees, first/birth families and adoptive families. I am an adoptive parent with extensive experience supporting my child through relational trauma, transitions, neurodevelopment differences and sensory. I also have a long professional history of supporting family reunification, birth parent rights, open permanency set ups and culturally appropriate permanency outcomes.

As PACC Coordinator, Keely completed PACC with the 2015-16 Twin Cities cohort. Prior to joining the CASCW team, she practiced both community and clinical social work with a focus on autism spectrum and related disorders across the lifespan, and is particularly interested in the intersection of child welfare and disability.

Leah Strom has been a social worker since 2001 and has practiced in many areas since that time including child protection, adoption, foster care, training and education. Leah's current role is the Phoenix Learning Xchange (PLX) Coordinator at the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW). 

Cam’s personal experience as an international adoptee from Korea informs and inspires his current professional work. He formed his own private practice, Therapy Redeemed, in 2018, to raise awareness and respond to the mental health needs of adoptees and their families wherever they may be in their adoption journey. Cam is PACC certified and registered as an accredited service provider through TAC via Center for Adoption Support and Education. He is also a vetted clinician with Foster Adopt MN.

I have worked in child welfare, kinship care, and adoption since 2004. I started out serving as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem with the Second Judicial District. From 2006-2017, I filled a variety of roles with the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC) that primarily centered around advocacy, support, leadership capacity development, and education for youth, young adults, families, and professionals within the foster care, kinship care, and adoption communities.

Neree's home is filled with biological, adopted and foster children. She has worked in various areas of child development and child welfare for more than 20 years, and mentors former foster youth on their own parenting journeys. She currently works in child welfare transformation, shifting system thinking about trauma, worthiness, race, and wellbeing while supporting agencies to find and/or maintain permanency for youth under their jurisdiction.

Amelia is the Founder and Executive Officer of the national non-profit, Alia. Amelia and Team Alia are UnSysteming the child welfare system and shifting mindsets and practice to keep children safely with, not from, their families. Alia employs a community co-design approach, working alongside parents with lived expertise and innovative systems leaders as partners to co-create new solutions to longstanding problems, while supporting the wellbeing of leaders, teams, and caregivers.