National Center for Adoption Competent Mental Health Services

The purpose of this funding opportunity will be to provide one grant to a recipient to create a National Center for Adoption Competent Mental Health Services (the Center) with the capacity to work with state child welfare systems to build the bridges with the mental health community for the further development and training of the mental health practitioners in issues related to separation, loss, grief and trauma and to develop strategies for making trauma-based competent mental health services consistently and comprehensively available throughout each state. All work of this entity will be accomplished utilizing a race equity lens.States struggle with providing comprehensive and adoption competent mental health services for children in foster care and adoptive/guardianship homes. Availability of mental health practitioners trained about the trauma-base experienced by these children is limited, yet these services are critical to the well-being and stability of children while in care and in adoptive/guardianship homes. Building bridges between the child welfare system and the state mental health systems is key to bringing about systemic change to increase and improve on the services provided to children/youth and their families.The development of a national center is expected to raise the level of utilization of existing evidence-informed, state-of-the-art adoption-competent training for mental health practitioners that will increase the access and availability of professionals with trauma informed competence. The Center will provide individual technical assistance to the child welfare systems of states, tribes, and territories in building alliances with the mental health community to build access to competent mental health services for children in care and in adoptive/guardianship homes.