Voices That Shape Care: Centering Lived Experience in Permanency & Adoption Competent Mental Health Care

What changes when youth, parents, and caregivers with lived experience help shape the services designed to support them?

Children, youth, adults, and families experiencing adoption, foster care, kinship care, guardianship, reunification, and other permanency journeys often experience loss, grief, identity questions, attachment challenges, and issues of belonging that traditional mental health approaches may not fully address. When lived experience is missing from service design and delivery, opportunities to better support healing and family well-being can be missed.

Join us on October 20, 2026, from 1:00–2:00 PM EDT for an engaging conversation featuring Debbie Riley, LCMFT, CEO of C.A.S.E., and National Center Lived Experience Advocates Deanna Mousseau, Isabel Stasa, and Staci Jonson. Together, they will explore how lived experience can strengthen adoption competent mental health services, support family-centered healing, and help shape more responsive systems of care.

Through reflection, discussion, and a brief role play, participants will examine the differences between adoption competent and non-adoption competent approaches and explore the important role of youth, parents, and caregivers in strengthening services and supports. Attendees will also hear firsthand how lived experience advocates are helping inform system improvement efforts across States, Tribes, and Territories.

Participants will leave with practical ideas to elevate lived experience, strengthen partnerships with youth and families, and advance adoption competent mental health care within their own systems, services, and communities.

Register Here

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