Alison Feigh

Zero Abuse Project (Jacob Wetterling Resource Center)

Youth Serving Organizations can provide quality experiences for youth to grow and thrive under the care of staff and volunteers with the best interests of the youth. 

The sad reality is that any organization that provides access, time, and the ability to build relationships with youth are targeted by offenders as places to find possible targets. 

Most people are in youth work for the right reasons, but one person engaging in a group to look for targets can destroy the legacy of a program and. even worse, have detrimental effects to the lives of youth involved. 

There is no room for denial or minimization when the health of children and youth are at stake. This presentation will provide resources to both adults working within youth serving organizations who are diligently trying to keep their programs safe and community members wanting to learn more about warning signs and prevention.

Dr. Michael Saini 

Professor and Endowed Chair of Law and Social Work at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto

Supervised parenting plans are often framed as a way to manage risk, monitor behaviour, and preserve parent-child contact when concerns have been raised about safety, emotional harm, or strained relationships. Yet supervision also raises a central question: what kind of trust has been damaged, and what incremental steps are needed before parenting time can safely become less restrictive?  

This presentation introduces the trust factor as a practical framework for designing supervised parenting plans. Trust is not treated as a single feeling or a binary judgment. Instead, the presentation distinguishes among different forms of trust that may need to be assessed and rebuilt over time. Calculus-based trust develops when a parent demonstrates compliance with expectations, follows rules, respects boundaries, and shows that predictable, safe behaviour can be relied upon. Knowledge-based trust emerges through repeated experiences that allow the child, supervisor, and other parent to better understand how the parent responds to stress, limits, disappointment, and the child’s emotional cues. Identification-based trust reflects a deeper level of relational repair, where the child experiences the parent as emotionally attuned, accountable, respectful, and able to hold the child’s needs in mind. 

Using this framework, supervised parenting plans can be structured as incremental pathways rather than static arrangements. Early stages may focus on safety and behavioural reliability; later stages may assess consistency, emotional regulation, responsiveness, and insight. Participants will consider how courts, supervisors, and parents can use observable indicators, review points, and step-up criteria to support plans that are transparent, proportional, developmentally sensitive, and focused on both protection and repair.

Lyndi Bradley

Merina Cameron

Florida State University: Institute for Trauma and Resilience Studies

This session explores the idea of stress contagion: how emotions and stress can spread between people, sometimes without us even realizing it’s happening. It covers how our nervous systems come into the room with us and how things like our tone, body language, communication, and reactions can either add to stress in a situation or help bring it down. 

The presentation also explores co-regulation and what that actually means in supervised visitation, focusing on how a professional’s presence and responses can help create stability without taking responsibility for someone else’s emotions. It also looks at how stress can spread across teams, especially after difficult visits or during high-stress periods. 

Professionals will leave with practical ways to recognize stress contagion, notice their own reactions, and respond while still maintaining boundaries, safety, and accountability.

Tiffini Thrower

YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester

Before a family ever reaches a supervised visitation center, they've often already spent an anxious morning in a courthouse hallway—juice boxes, coloring books, and headphones in hand, doing whatever it takes to get two small children through a custody hearing. At the YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester, two programs that look very different on paper—Children's Centers in the Courthouse and Supervised Visitation & Safe Exchange—actually serve the same families at different points in the same journey.

This interactive workshop follows one family's path from the courthouse waiting room to the visitation room, showing how a true continuum of care keeps children at the center of services without placing them in the middle of adult conflict.

Participants will examine their own programs' relationships with courts and community partners, identify the gaps between the systems surrounding the families they serve, and leave with the start of their own Family Connection Map—a practical tool for building stronger partnerships between courts, providers, and community organizations back home.

Nikki Romer

Carrie Jensen

National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children

This session will help participants understand who drug-endangered children are, along with the risks and long-term impacts associated with parental and caregiver substance misuse and drug activity. Trainers will share the importance of early identification and intervention, opportunities for both, and the need for multidisciplinary collaboration to identify and help these children. 

Trainers will provide relatable examples for all disciplines and activities to assist in applying this challenging topic. Trainers will help attendees identify opportunities to change the trajectories of drug-endangered children's lives and break multigenerational cycles.

Marissa Orzechowski

Amy Kinney 

First Step Fostoria 

This session with provider advanced understanding of domestic violence, its impact on survivors and children, and trauma-informed strategies for responding to concerns and disclosures. Participants will  take part in an interactive survivor-based scenario designed to build empathy and experience firsthand some of the barriers survivors face when navigating the system.

Emilyn Wahl, Someplace Safe 

Chrystal Fischer, Parenting with Grace 

Supervised parenting time is about far more than observing visits. Every interaction, transition, and decision shapes a child's experience of safety, stability, and connection. What if supervised parenting time wasn't viewed as simply monitoring visits, but as one of the most meaningful opportunities to create emotional and physical safety for children and families during one of the most difficult seasons of their lives?

Through real-world examples, trauma-informed principles, and practical strategies, this session explores how intentional communication, thoughtful program design, and child-centered practice can transform supervised parenting time into an opportunity for healing, resilience, and hope. Participants will leave inspired by the impact of their work and equipped with practical ideas they can immediately implement to strengthen safety, professionalism, and positive outcomes within their own programs.

Tamela Rystrom 

MillarRich, LLC 

Many organizations claim to be trauma-informed, yet few have successfully integrated trauma-informed principles into hiring practices, leadership development, supervision, accountability systems, policies, and workplace culture. 

This presentation provides a practical roadmap for moving beyond awareness and creating a sustainable trauma-informed workplace. Drawing from MillarRich's organizational journey, attendees will learn concrete strategies for building psychological safety while maintaining accountability, improving employee engagement, reducing workplace stress, and developing resilient teams.

Shannon Wegner 

Arrows Family Services 

Good intentions do not always create positive impact. In supervised visitation, even well-intended interventions can unintentionally undermine parental confidence, reinforce power imbalances, or create dependence on providers. This interactive workshop challenges professionals to examine the difference between helping, directing, coaching, and empowering. 

Through real-world scenarios, participants will explore how professional power, culture, trauma, cognitive abilities, and personal assumptions influence their interactions with families. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for using intentional, individualized interventions that maintain safety while building parental capacity, confidence, and lasting change.

The Honorable Judge Victor Reyes (ret)

Mahakaruna Holistic Foundation

During this session, participants will identify their most important personal values, how they developed them, and whether they actually live by them. We will then discuss the parallel lanes of lived values and organizational values and reflect on what it feels like to work in alignment with those values. 

Finally, the group will discuss how we can enhance both our lives and the lives of those we serve by identifying where our organizations can become more aligned with the needs of their constituents through the authentic application of a system of values.

Michelle Harris 

CornerHouse 

Children who experience abuse or neglect may describe what happened to them in many ways. When a child talks about abuse, it is called disclosure. Disclosures can be purposeful or accidental.

Disclosing abuse or neglect is a process or a journey not a destination. Part of the journey often includes recantation or taking back the disclosure. Understanding the dynamics of the process a child may go through when disclosing, including recantation, can help us understand how to better serve victims of crimes and therefore help in the healing journey. Additionally, we need to understand this process, including what the research tells us is "normal" to speak effectively on the subject in the courtroom.

This training will help learners better understand the disclosure process, including recantation. Learners will gain knowledge and resources- including the most updated research- along with practical solutions on incorporating the information into practice.