We build child & family well-being by designing and delivering high-quality learning opportunities to caregivers, parents and professionals.

Children’s Alliance is excited to partner with non-profits, state agencies and international organizations to implement learning solutions that help families and advance service programs.

The MAPP Institute

“….an excellent resource that should be mandatory for all parents - not just for foster parents.” — Foster Parent Survey

The Children's Alliance offers the evidence-based Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting preparation programs. The MAPP approach rests on four cornerstone principles to promote foster and adoptive parent readiness.

  • Partnership - MAPP prepares foster parents to partner with families and service teams to offer the best possibility for family reunification and to ensure healthy family connections while children are separated from family.

  • Healing - MAPP provides foster and adoptive parents with the knowledge and critical skills to support healing for children and youth while they are in foster care… and sometimes as an ongoing resource.

  • Mutual Selection - MAPP ensures prospective foster and adoptive parents and agency staff have the opportunity to make mutual decisions about readiness for providing trust-based care. There is time for consultation and self-reflection.

  • Integrated Learning - MAPP combines the best of adult learning practices with current child welfare research to deliver quality skill-based preparation for prospective foster caregivers. Learning is supported by a community of peer and professional leaders. Caregivers retain important concepts and are prepared to support children in foster care.

  • MAPP Foundations

    Our MAPP Foundation series provides 30 hours of training to prospective foster and adoptive parents over ten weeks. Foundations utilizes parent leaders and professionals to build a support network, enhance skills and assess readiness for foster caregiving.

  • Deciding Together

    Deciding Together allows prospective foster or adoptive parents to cover the same important MAPP concepts in a more flexible format. Deciding together is delivered by one Leader to one family over approximately seven weeks.

  • Caring For Our Own

    Caring For Our Own is a nine-week, 27-hour support group designed to provide kinship caregivers with assistance and ideas to help them work in partnership with the helping network, the children and the birth parents of the children. The program includes information on trauma and current federal guidelines for kinship care.

  • MAPP Kinship

    We’ve partnered with Kansas DCF to develop an innovative and unique approach to kin family training and support. Kinship Origins provides an online, on-demand resource to kin families in the early weeks of caring for a relative child or youth. We’ve recently piloted Kinship Path, which offers a more extensive licensing training and utilizes peer support. And we are finishing our Kinship Home series, which will provide on-demand training to help families advance their skills and find the “right-time” support to help children and youth heal and grow.

  • And More

    For Kansas residents, we facilitate access to a catalog of over 50-60 trainings courses per month statewide - many available virtually. Visit our Training Events page to learn more! If you are interested in learning from our trainers outside of Kansas, contact learn@childally.org to let us know how we can help!

In addition to our MAPP programs, Children’s Alliance offers a wide variety of caregiver training from a growing learning library.

  • NTI

    The Children’s Alliance hosts the National Training Initiative’s Adoption Competent Professional series. Our supervisor coaching sessions support training completion and build peer support for supervisors and their teams.

  • CORE TEEN

    Children’s Alliance is excited to implement CORE TEEN, a curriculum designed for both prospective and current families who support older youth from the child welfare system who have moderate to severe emotional and behavioral challenges.

  • Trust-Based Caregiving

    Children’s Alliance is dedicated to training foster and adoptive parents in trust-based care. The Alliance works with a network of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI®) practitioners to provide regular opportunities for TBRI® training for foster and adoptive caregivers.

  • And more

    The Alliance and the agencies we partner with have developed a wide variety of training curricula to support birth, kin, foster and adoptive parenting. Topics that address brain development, suicide prevention, mental and physical health, human trafficking and internet safety are part of our ongoing training calendar.