Creating A Family

In 2024, Creating a Family updated and delivered the Prenatal Exposure Workshop for Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Parents over five workshops online during the year. This workshop is designed to help participants recognize children who may have been impacted by prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs and trains them on best practices for working with these children and youth to help them thrive. The workshop was delivered over five sessions and includes a video with embedded video interviews with experts from UNC's Knowles Center for Alcohol Studies, Duke University School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and foster parents with lived experience raising children with prenatal substance exposure. Further, the videos included animated videos that we created to help explain and animate complex concepts. Each workshop is facilitated by two staff and includes group discussion during each session. Participants have access to an online resource library to reference further materials on topics presented during the workshop, including diagnosis, strategies, and further resources.

Another invaluable program service is the Creating a Family podcast. This free, weekly, one-hour production, hosted by Executive Director, Dawn Davenport, covers topics in the fields of adoption, foster care and kinship care with guests that are specialists in their respective fields. Further, each week, Dawn answers listeners' questions during a 5-10 minute podcast that is published on the weekend. There were 169,900 listens during 2024 and 3.1 million listens since the podcast's inception. Creating a Family created a 4-hour facilitated training specific to child welfare professionals to help them better understand the impact of prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs, recognize children who may have been exposed, and support the adoptive, foster, and kinship families who are raising them. In 2024, we piloted this training with ten public child welfare agencies and one American Indian tribe. In collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Social Work, the training was evaluated and its impact on child welfare professionals was assessed. Children and youth who were exposed during pregnancy to alcohol and drugs are significantly more likely to face placement instability. Child Welfare Professionals trained on the long-term developmental and behavioral impacts of this exposure are better prepared to train and support the families raising these kids.

The Creating a Family website, www.CreatingaFamily.org is the focal point of our organization. Our mission is to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them in raising children exposed to trauma, including prenatal exposure, by creating expert-based and trauma-informed resources and training for parents and professionals. Our website is where we house the resources and trainings we create. In 2022, Creating a Family averaged 50,500+ average page views monthly. There is no charge for the vast majority of resources provided on the site.

Creating a Family provides online courses for adoptive, foster, and kinship parents and continuing education courses for social workers in the child welfare field. We have 75+ parent courses for pre-adoptive, in-service foster, and post-adoption families. Each course is 1 hour and comes with a Certificate of Completion. Our courses align with the federal requirements for international adoption and various state-specific pre-adoption education requirements. Our courses address topics relevant to adoptive, foster, and kinship families. We also offer 19 courses accredited by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) to offer continuing education (CE) credit for social workers. In 2024, more than 36,252 courses were enrolled.

Creating a Family reaches out to individuals through its weekly adoption, foster care, and kinship newsletter to 6,400 subscribers and through its broad exposure to the social networks that it maintains on Facebook (9,650+ followers and over 11,300 followers of the Support Group page), Instagram (3,100+) and Pinterest (6,450+) followers. Creating a Family also reaches out to adoption and foster professionals through its weekly newsletter to 4,200 subscribers and through LinkedIn (1,576) followers.

In 2024, Creating a Family delivered both in-person and online support groups for kinship caregivers providing opportunities for peer support and learning. Further, in 2024, we launched a monthly legal clinic for kinship caregivers in North Carolina. We work with three NC family law attorneys to answer questions through an online clinic by Zoom. We continued to provide information on legal permanency options to North Carolina kinship caregivers through NCkinshipfamilies.org. This is a multimedia website that we developed featuring expert videos, kinship caregiver videos, tip sheets, and other resources to help relative caregivers consider their best options when making permanency decisions. The website offers links and information on how to find an attorney and additional legal resources. All of our programs for relative caregivers are developed with input from our Kinship Advisory Board made up of relative caregivers from across the state of North Carolina.

Creating a Family provided weekly content creation in the form of articles and corresponding images for an outside organization to publish on their website. Content covered a range of topics developed in partnership with the organization to support grandparents raising grandchildren and other relative caregivers in their target area.