Youth Thrive: A Framework to Help Adolescents Overcome Trauma and Thrive

Helping youth realize their dreams while also keeping them safe and attending to their physical and emotional needs is the goal for all parents. Balancing dreams and needs also defines the role of those working with youth in the child welfare system. In 2011, the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) began an effort to reverse the troubling outcomes that many young people in the foster care system experience CSSP is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to improving life chances for our country's most vulnerable children, youth, and families and has a long history of working with child welfare systems to produce better results. CSSP's interest in creating a youth development agenda coincided with several other important changes: breakthroughs in the field of adolescent brain development, the passage of the federal Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act 1 in 2008, and the federal call for child welfare agencies to elevate their focus on child and youth well-being, in addition to safety and permanency.