Lindsey Dula, LMSW

National Forensic Interviewing Network 

Feelings of doubt, shame, and embarrassment are only a few of the fears experienced by those who have survived child sexual abuse.

Practitioners and researchers have examined the prevalence of child sexual abuse since the 1970s, yet more than 50 years later, there remains a lack of understanding about the disclosure process for victims.

This session will explore the complexities and research surrounding disclosures, emphasizing how critically important it is for all professionals serving child victims to understand the barriers to disclosure.

Content will include discussions on adult survivors of child sexual abuse, the impact of trauma, and the benefits of understanding the complexities of disclosure for investigators and legal professionals.

Lindsey Dula served in the field for over 24 years as a specialized child protection worker & supervisor, a dedicated forensic interviewer, and provided oversight of various CAC programs, including establishing the MDT Coordination Program, & oversight for the Client Relations Specialist, Family Advocate, & Forensic Interviewing Programs and has conducted over 7,500 forensic interviews regarding allegations of sexual & physical abuse, medical child abuse, witnesses to DV/IPV, trafficking, drug endangered children, & homicides.  She is a proud TCU Alumna with a Bachelor of Science in Social Work & Psychology & has her Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas in Arlington.

Kate Blair, Executive Director 

Claudia Williams, Bright House Program Director 

Brightside Child & Family Advocacy 

Supervised visitation programs play a vital role in supporting family connections and promoting child safety within complex systems of care. When cases involve child welfare or foster care, visitation becomes a key component of reunification and permanency planning, requiring coordination among multiple professionals and caregivers.

This workshop will help providers understand the essential dynamics of serving child welfare cases, including the role of visitation in family preservation and reunification. Equally important, participants will learn strategies for building effective partnerships with child welfare agencies, foster parents, and the courts. Drawing from Bright House’s experience, this session will highlight real-world practices that strengthen collaboration, reduce conflict, and keep the child’s needs at the center.

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of what it takes to successfully serve child welfare and foster care cases, along with concrete tools to strengthen their partnerships with agencies and stakeholders in their own communities.

Kate Blair joined Brightside Child & Family Advocacy (previously Savannah CASA) as the Executive Director in 2018. During her time with Brightside, the organization has added 17 staff members, 200 CASA volunteers, and the Bright House, a supervised visitation and family support center. By remaining laser-focused on fundraising, community engagement, and growth, Brightside's team has achieved its ambitious goal of serving 100% of children in foster care and program expansion. Before joining, Kate served as the Director of Development & Communications with Step Up Savannah.

Her past professional and volunteer experience includes communications, corporate foundations, nonprofit leadership, board development, and fundraising. Kate has her BA in Professional Communications. She is a graduate of Leadership Savannah and a board member of Migrant Equity Southeast and Tharros Place. She and her husband Andy are the proud parents of two incredible teen boys, Tek & Firdawek. 

When Kate is not out shaking the money trees, she is typically found with a wine glass in hand while planning the next party or vacation

Breanna Allen

Allen Consulting, LLC

When families enter supervised visitation and child access programs, they often bring with them experiences of trauma, gender-based violence, and systemic inequities. This workshop explores the critical role of cross-disciplinary collaboration among advocates, law enforcement, courts, and medical providers in ensuring safety, healing, and justice for survivors and children.

Participants will engage with survivor-centered frameworks, case-based scenarios, and practical tools that can be immediately applied within their programs. Grounded in anti-oppressive and trauma-informed practice, this session highlights how collaborative response teams improve family outcomes, build survivor trust in systems, and strengthen the effectiveness of supervised visitation services. 

Attendees will leave with concrete strategies, reflection prompts, and a collaboration readiness checklist to bring back to their programs.

Merina Campbell, MSW

Florida State University 

Supervised visitation professionals often work at the intersection of trauma, family stress, and resilience. This workshop takes a hopeful, evidence-based look at how practitioners can support growth and healing in both the families they serve and themselves. 

Participants will explore three key protective factors: Posttraumatic Growth (PTG), Compassion Satisfaction, and Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs). Together, these concepts offer a practical framework for helping families recover and thrive after adversity while also promoting professional well-being in emotionally demanding work.

Through guided reflection, hands-on tools, and real-world examples, this session provides concrete strategies that can be applied immediately in supervised visitation settings to strengthen resilience, build connection, and support lasting stability for children and families.

Anna Swan

Calm Visitation

Emily Landrum, MAEd

Supervised visitation monitors play a vital role in ensuring child safety, maintaining neutrality, and facilitating peaceful connections between children and non-custodial parents. Yet one critical factor often overlooked in training and practice is the monitor’s own trauma history or unresolved triggers. When a monitor experiences stress, vicarious trauma, or personal unresolved experiences, it can unintentionally create barriers to safety, neutrality, and effective visitation.

This workshop will explore how trauma within the professional can affect judgment, reactivity, and interactions during high-conflict family visits. 

Participants will gain insight into recognizing early warning signs of secondary trauma, understanding the importance of boundaries, and integrating mindful self-check practices before taking on a case. Practical tools and strategies will be provided for cultivating resilience, prioritizing self-care, and ensuring that the monitor's wellness does not compromise the child's safety.

Attendees will leave with tangible methods to integrate into daily practice, fostering healthier monitors, safer visits, and more reliable outcomes for families. The workshop will also advocate for trauma-informed care in supervised visitation as a professional standard of practice.

The Honorable Kenlyn Foster 

Blout County Juvenile Courts

This dynamic and interactive workshop offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from the bench about how child welfare decisions are made—and what providers can do to support better outcomes for families. 

The session explores how judges interpret and apply child protection laws, balance safety and reunification goals, and respond to emerging issues such as trauma-informed practice, racial and cultural equity, and meaningful family engagement.

The workshop emphasizes the essential connection between courts and frontline providers, including how visitation professionals, caseworkers, and family service providers can work in alignment with judicial expectations. It will also explore how provider documentation, communication, and client interactions can influence the court’s understanding of a family's progress and needs.

Amy C Joyner DNP MSN-Ed BSN RN

Marymount University

Jill M. Flynn Ed.D M.Ed, BA

George Mason University

Trauma-informed care in infancy is about rewriting a child's story before it’s fully written—creating a foundation of safety, connection, and resilience that can last a lifetime. Trauma-informed care (TIC) for infants is a specialized approach that recognizes the profound impact early adversity can have on neurodevelopment, attachment, and long-term health outcomes. Infants, although preverbal, are highly sensitive to environmental stressors and their caregivers' responses.

This presentation integrates developmental science, relational principles, and evidence-based practices to support healing and resilience in the earliest stages of life. It is essential for professionals working with young children and families.

Dr. Ariane Schratter

Maryville College 

Many communities experience a cultural distance between academia and community stakeholders. Therefore, academic–court partnerships for supervised visitation programs require intentional strategies focused on relationship-building and mutual benefit. Addressing structural challenges is essential for sustained collaboration and community impact.

This presentation explores how Blount County Juvenile Court and Maryville College (Maryville, Tennessee) are building a co-learning environment centered on a shared vision of sustainable and trauma-responsive supervised visitation. Courts and colleges often operate with different timelines, priorities, and definitions of success. Establishing shared goals, maintaining regular dialogue, and implementing adaptive processes help bridge these gaps and create more responsive programming.

Universities and colleges support community-engaged collaborations to varying degrees, which can result in undervaluing faculty and student partnership work—creating challenges in initiating or sustaining these collaborations. Advocating for institutional changes, such as recognizing partnership work in academic metrics (e.g., tenure and promotion criteria) and pursuing joint grant funding, are effective strategies.

Our college–court agreement allows either party to adjust programming in real time and respond to evolving needs. We aim to discuss ways to invest early in relationship-building for collaborative program planning and student mentoring within a co-leadership model that values both academic and community knowledge and needs.

Tammy Hopper, MSW, CYC-P

National Safe Place

Whether a child and youth care professional is working in a shelter, group home, out-of-school-time program, detention center, as a child protective services worker, or in a youth development center, the shared commitment to positive and optimal youth development is more significant than the differences in these roles.

For more than 30 years, the movement to establish certification options for child and youth care workers has gained momentum, and a formalized process to recognize their competencies and skills is now available.

The Child and Youth Care (CYC) Certification, recognized by the Council on Accreditation, is available at the entry, associate, and professional levels. This session will feature an overview of the link between the certification process and ethics, decreased organizational risk, increased staff satisfaction, and improved employee retention.

Marcie Smith 

The Children's Haven, Inc.

Empathetic distress is a mindset that can lead to serious problems for people in the workplace. While most professionals are motivated by a desire to help others, factors such as empathy fatigue, organizational distrust, and the overwhelming scale of social issues can result in burnout and feelings of disconnection from nonprofit missions.

Organizations offering supervised visitation programs often struggle to help their communities understand and connect with their work. Families separated due to foster care involvement participate in court-ordered supervised visitation as part of the reunification process. It is understandable that members of the community may assume children enter foster care solely because of abuse or neglect by parents or caregivers—and this is sometimes true. Yet fostering empathy for parents in these situations can feel difficult.

However, our organizations depend on community support—through advocacy, funding, and awareness. It is essential to use innovative storytelling, leverage partnerships, and increase understanding of our goals and impact to build stronger community connections. In supervised visitation, we are helping tell a family’s story, and our work requires garnering support for the family unit, not just the child. This workshop will share innovative strategies to engage your community and strengthen support for supervised visitation programs.

Empathetic distress and burnout affect not only service providers but also the people receiving services. This session will encourage participants to reflect on what it means to thrive as human beings and to develop tools for reconnecting with purpose, compassion, and self-compassion. These practices allow us to show up fully—for ourselves, our loved ones, our clients, and everyone we encounter—in the healthiest way possible.

As professionals, we have assumed a profound responsibility for the care and welfare of others. Yet when we are overwhelmed or distressed, we cannot access the wisdom needed to best serve our clients. This presentation speaks to all who work in stressful environments, addressing the fundamental aspects of being human while doing emotionally demanding work.

By shifting our mindset about how and why we do this work, we can cultivate happier, healthier lives—changes that naturally extend to every area of our personal and professional experience. This session invites reflection on how we wish to show up in the world, both for ourselves and for others, so that we may be of greater service to our communities.

Jennifer Landhuis 

Emma MacDonald 

Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center (SPARC) 

Many offenders engage in stalking behaviors to perpetuate the cycle of abuse and control after a relationship has ended, and supervised visitation centers can become the front line of the offender's criminal behavior. It is imperative that supervised visitation centers and their staff are equipped to recognize and respond to stalking behaviors in order to promote safety and security for all participants.

This session will provide practical tools for identifying stalking behaviors within a supervised visitation center and offer guidance on how centers can structure their services to enhance safety for victims of stalking.

The session will also examine how technology plays an integral and unique role in facilitating this dangerous form of victimization and provide useful strategies for promoting digital safety among staff and visitation center partners.

Emily McKee 

Kymari House 

Supervised visitation professionals carry the emotional weight of families in crisis while striving to maintain neutrality, safety, and empathy—a combination that can quietly lead to burnout if left unaddressed. In this session, participants will explore the realities of compassion fatigue in visitation work and learn sustainable, HOPE-informed strategies for balancing empathy with self-preservation.

Drawing from Kymari House’s experience in maintaining a stable, high-performing team with zero turnover, this workshop provides practical tools to strengthen resilience, foster reflective practice, and build a culture of wellness. Participants will leave with realistic, actionable steps to sustain both themselves and their teams, ensuring that compassion remains a renewable resource.

Dr. Richelle Whittaker 

Boys growing up in high-conflict families often face unique challenges that put them at risk for emotional distress, academic disengagement, and behavioral difficulties. However, research shows that protective factors such as positive parent-child communication, consistent support systems, and trauma-informed care can buffer against these risks and foster resilience.

In this engaging and practical session, Dr. Whittaker will introduce her STRONG Framework as a roadmap for equipping boys to thrive despite family instability. Participants will explore how everyday interactions, intentional advocacy, and collaborative partnerships with schools and service providers can disrupt cycles of conflict and nurture emotionally whole, confident young men.

This workshop will feature real-life case examples, interactive reflection, and actionable strategies that professionals can immediately integrate into their work with families.

Elizabeth Derickson, DSW-C, LCSW, RPT-S

Faith Linne

Epic Prevention 

Supervised visitation comes with its share of surprises — and sometimes the best way to learn is by stepping into the moment. This interactive, game-show-style workshop invites participants to test their skills with real-life (and often funny) scenarios from visitation practice. Using a lighthearted format with buzz-in questions, audience polls, and group discussion, participants will laugh, reflect, and walk away with practical tools for handling the unexpected. The focus is on building child-centered, trauma-informed responses while keeping professionalism intact — even when things don’t go as planned.

Nakia Austin, MA LPC

www.nikiaaustin.com 

This workshop gives men and women a raw, inside look at the aftermath of trauma in the lives of children. Nakia shares a powerful story of a cold and calculated abuser and how his torture affected the lives of two little boys. 

The discussion explores the behavioral, physical, and mental effects of trauma — and how to move forward in the healing process. We also examine statistical data and case studies. Finally, we discuss how to implement trauma-informed approaches when working with trauma survivors.