Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson will join Traci LaLiberte, executive director of the School of Social Work's Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare, for a special news conference Nov. 1.

The news conference will announce the University's new Permanency and Adoption Competency Certificate (PACC) program and recognize November as National Adoption Month.

The PACC was developed in partnership with the Center for Adoption Support and Education (CASE), a national resource organization, in response to community demand to meet the need for increasing the availability and competency of a professional workforce able to serve the unique and complex clinical and practice needs for adopted individuals and their families.

Public and private child welfare professionals work with children traumatized by abuse, neglect, and abandonment as they adjust to life with foster, kin, and adoptive families.

"Foster and adoptive families have identified the need for access to adoption competent mental health and child welfare services," LaLiberte says. "Our goal is to provide a network of competent professionals throughout the state of Minnesota through offering this advanced training program."

The PACC provides 90 hours of training along with 18 hours of clinical supervision. It teaches the knowledge and skills needed to competently work with the complex needs of families that have been impacted by foster care and adoption. Forty-two mental health and child welfare professionals in Minnesota are participating in first-year cohorts this fall in the Twin Cities and Duluth.

"Our goal is to support adopted children and their families--and those yet to adopt--so they remain together forever," Jesson says. "This training can help reduce adoption disruptions and dissolutions so families will not only survive but thrive."

Representatives from the North American Council on Adoptable Children will also attend the news conference.

See more in this Minnesota Public Radio story.