Webinar Recap: Partnering with Parents

Centering Family Voice and Leadership

What would it look like to shift toward authentic partnership with parents and caregivers?

That question was at the heart of Positive Childhood Alliance North Carolina’s October 2026 webinar, Partnering with Parents: Centering Family Voice and Leadership.

The session brought together national, state, and local perspectives on moving beyond family engagement toward true partnership with parents and caregivers, supporting authentic leadership, and building a more connected family support ecosystem across North Carolina.

The webinar was opened and facilitated by PCANC’s Shantel Haskins, Membership and Events Coordinator. Presenters were PCANC’s Felisha McElvine, MSW, LCSWA, Family Leadership Program Manager; Kara Georgi, Lead Senior Associate of Parent Partnerships with the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance; and Lanitta Berry, BBA, Child Welfare and Business Administration Consultant.

WHAT WE EXPLORED
The National Perspective: Start with One

Georgi shared lessons from nearly two decades of partnering with parents at the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance, beginning with the Alliance’s own National Parent Partnership Council, which started with a single parent and grew with intention over time, eventually including co-chairs who serve on the Alliance’s board of directors.

Her message was that partnership is an active choice, and it doesn’t have to be perfect from day one. It’s okay to be in what she called the “messy play-doh stage,” figuring things out together.Georgi also offered a few practical ideas:

  1. Be clear about expectations. Name the time commitment up front, and welcome whatever families can offer, whether that’s three hours or thirty minutes.
  2. Offer more than one way to contribute. Parents can speak, train, review written materials, or help interpret survey data, rather than just attending meetings.
  3. Invest in people. Compensation shows that someone’s time is valued. Training in areas like the Protective Factors Framework, strategic sharing, and strengths-based messaging both builds capacity and is an investment.
  4. Don’t stop at the parents you already know. Today’s trusted parent leader will eventually need others beside them.

Shared Decision-Making in Practice: North Carolina’s Child Welfare Family Advisory Council

McElvine described how PCANC supports the Child Welfare Family Advisory Council (CWFAC) in partnership with the North Carolina Division of Social Services (NCDSS) The council’s 12 members include birth parents, foster parents, grandparents, kinship caregivers, and youth. No single family partner represents every family, so the council makes room for many experiences and perspectives.

Members take part in monthly lunch-and-learns, monthly meetings, five design teams across the state, and peer mentoring that pares experienced members with new ones. To support authentic participation, PCANC coordinates orientation and meeting preparation, offers stipends and reimbursement, and gives members several ways to share: speaking aloud, using the virtual chat, writing privately, or passing.

McElvine was also candid about what’s still in progress. A workgroup is designing a feedback loop so family partners can see what happens to their recommendations, including when an idea changes or doesn’t move forward. It’s a proposed model that PCANC hopes will be up and running in the coming months.

Authentic Engagement with Expecting and Parenting Populations

Berry shared her lived experience in the foster care system as a parenting teen, and what it taught her about the gaps between the systems that serve families. Parents often navigate many systems that don’t communicate with one another, and expecting and parenting young people are frequently left out of planning and decision-making. States are also not federally required to collect data on this population, which can make families feel invisible.

Drawing on Case Family Programs’ four pillars of authentic engagement (sharing power, prioritizing people with lived experience, creating psychological safety, and equipping everyone to fully engage), Berry encouraged organizations to:

  • Ask why they want to work with people with lived experience, and be honest about the answer.
  • Define terms like “lived experience” and “partnership” so everyone shares a common language.
  • Pay people with lived experience and treat them like any other professional.
  • Build pathways for lived experts to serve as subject matter experts.
  • Acknowledge mistakes, address them, and move forward.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Across all three presenters, a few themes kept coming up:

  • Start where you are. You don’t need a perfect structure before you invite a parent to the table. Build intentionally, stay open to learning, and let it get a little messy.
  • Bring families in early. Partnership deepens when families help define the question, before choices are final. Be honest about what is open for discussion, what the constraints are, and who makes the final decision.
  • Support makes participation real. Compensation, child care, a meal, clear expectations, and follow-through helps families be fully present, and help ensure they’re partners rather than tokens.
  • Close the loop. People need to know what happens with their ideas.

FROM CONVERSATION TO ACTION
At the end of the webinar, presenters left attendees with questions to take back to their own organizations:

Where could we invite families to help shape a decision from the beginning? Are we currently working with family partners, and if not, what’s getting in the way? What does allyship look like in our work, and what is one step we can take?

RESOURCES
Building stronger support for North Carolina’s children and families isn’t the responsibility of one organization, agency, or sector. We all have a role, and we can start where we are. 

  • Explore the Partnering with Parents section of the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance Website Dig Deeper
  • Learn more about the Child Welfare Family Advisory Council Learn More
  • Watch the webinar recording and access more resources in our digital Resource Library Visit the Resource Library
  • Join the Positive Childhood Alliance to access the Resource Library for free! Join the Alliance