FosterClub Training

Our group of leaders with experience in the child welfare system will invite you to consider: Is foster parenting right for me and my family? What is fostering REALLY like? Are you ready to begin the journey?

Discover Foster Parenting: Learn

Course • 10 lessons

Learn directly from people with experience in the child welfare system about the critical role of great foster parents, what it's like for youth who enter foster care, and the importance of rooting for birth families.

Discover Foster Parenting: Be Inspired

Course • 8 lessons

Find inspiration through the journeys of individuals with first hand experience in the child welfare system as they share how best to support youth and families through the challenging experience of foster care.

Discover Foster Parenting: Thinking of Becoming a Foster Parent?

Course • 8 lessons

Foster parenting one of the greatest acts of service you can sign up for. Before you take the leap, learn what foster parenting is REALLY like, from young people with lived experience in care, families of origin, foster parents and kin caregivers.

Health Care for Transition Age Foster Youth

In this course, foster parents learn how to support youth in their care with the difficult transition to adulthood by ensuring they are prepared to manage their health care before living independently.

Helping Youth Prepare for the Transition to Adulthood

This course provides foster parents with guidance on how to help youth and emerging adults build a foundation for a successful transition to adult life outside of foster care.

Using the FosterClub Transition Toolkit

This course introduces the FosterClub Transition Toolkit--a step by step tool for youth aging out of care to develop a transition plan (required by federal law)-- and how foster parents can actively engage in this process with youth in their care.

Impact of Separation on Children and Youth

In this course, foster parents and other child welfare stakeholders learn how separation and loss impacts the children and youth they care for, and effective strategies and tools to help them develop coping skills.

Promoting Normalcy

Course • 14 lessons

This course explores system-imposed barriers to normalcy, and the efforts and importance to provide normalcy for children and youth in foster care.

Supporting Connections to Birth Parents

Course • 13 lessons

In this course, learn how foster parents can help support and guide children and youth on their journeys to creating or maintaining the extremely critical, healthy connections to their birth parents.

The Sibling Bond

Course • 11 lessons

This course explores the profound impact of sibling relationships on young people in foster care and discusses ideas foster parents can use to reconnect or strengthen a sibling bond.

FosterClub's Permanency Pact

This course helps supportive adults understand permanency and the Permanency Pact, providing tools to guide youth in their care towards building and strengthening relationships with supportive people in their life.

An Introduction to Permanence

Course • 14 lessons

This course is designed to help foster parents and caregivers understand and support permanency for foster youth, including how to talk to youth about planning for permanency.

Helping Foster Youth Through the Holidays

This course provides tools to help ease anxieties for children and youth in care surrounding holiday periods, and includes tools created by youth with lived experience who share their perspectives on how they want to be supported.

Supporting Higher Education Success: Part 2

This course shares available supports to ensure foster youth go from college admission to graduation, and how to help foster youth transition into life after foster care.

Supporting Higher Education Success: Part 1

Course • 15 lessons

This course discusses the unique barriers foster youth encounter when pursuing higher education, how foster parents can create a “college-going” culture, and ways to support youth to move through these challenges.

Educational Stability for Young People in Foster Care

Course • 13 lessons

This course will review laws currently in place to protect the educational experience of youth in foster care, and role of stability and positive advocacy in their education journey.

Fostering Young People of a Different Race

Course • 10 lessons

This course explores the importance of cultural connections for children and youth in care, and actions foster parents can take to ensure youth maintain a strong sense of racial identity and connection to culture.

Strategic Sharing

This course offers strategies to supportive adults that help youth in their care reframe foster care experience as expertise, and tools to prepare and support them in sharing their personal story.

Supporting LGBTQ2S+ Youth in Foster Care

Course • 11 lessons

This course is an introductory first step in path of increasing knowledge of LGBTQ2S+ issues, and how identity intersects with many other elements when a child or youth is in the foster care system.

Living Alongside COVID-19

Course • 13 lessons

This course reviews resources for the 2023 face of COVID-19, and specifically its impact on children and youth in and from foster care, and their families.

Introducing Your Home

This course offers a variety of articles, discussion guidelines, and engagement tools geared towards various ages of youth to help foster parents facilitate a smooth transition to their home.

Grief and Loss in Foster Care

Course • 16 lessons

This course outlines the ways grief and trauma can manifest in a child or youth's behaviors, and offers ways to help children and youth in foster care cope with feelings of grief and ambiguous loss.

Psychotropic Medications: Part 2

This course looks further into the use of psychotropic medications in children and youth in foster care, and shares ways foster parents can become children and youth's best advocates for safe and responsible use of medications when appropriate.

Psychotropic Medication: Part 1

This course reviews general concerns with using psychotropic medications for children and youth in foster care, and offers way to engage them in conversations about their mental health and the use of medication to manage it where appropriate.

Understanding Childhood Trauma

Course • 15 lessons

This course explores how trauma impacts the children and youth in foster care, and how foster parents can provide trauma-informed support to children and youth in their care.

Improving the Child Welfare System: Part 2

Course • 15 lessons

This course discusses the role of mental health and prevention efforts in the Family First Act, and how prevention services and more comprehensive reunification services provide a higher probability of keeping families together.

Improving the Child Welfare System: Part 1

Course • 18 lessons

This course helps develop a broader understanding of The Family First Prevention Services Act , and highlights the provisions and changes of the Family First Act aimed at reforming the Child Welfare system, and the impact children and families.

Understanding Child Welfare Legal Systems