child welfareThe School of Social Work’s Child and Family Research Institute held the 2015 Child Welfare Conference, Listening, Learning, and Uniting for Permanency, on November 9.

More than 150 attendees from a wide range of nonprofit and government agencies had the opportunity to learn skills to address the needs of and engage with biological parents and families of children in the child welfare system in Texas.

Alfred Pérez, assistant professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Public Policy, gave the keynote address. Pérez combined his personal experience as a youth that aged out of foster care with his academic research on permanency. He shared insights into how policy-sanctioned permanence does not always translate into psychological meaningful permanence for the children involved, and presented his findings from qualitative interviews with youth.

Read more about the conference here.