WonkCast – “It’s just loss”: C.A.S.E. CEO Debbie Riley on Why Adoption-Competent Mental Health Care Must Be Part of Child Welfare Systems
C.A.S.E. CEO Debbie Riley Featured on Child Welfare Wonk’s WonkCast
C.A.S.E. CEO Debbie Riley, LCMFT discusses the intersection of mental health and child welfare, and highlights why adoption-competent care must move from specialized practice to a standard that families can access across systems.
Listen to the WonkCastChildren and families connected to adoption, foster, and kinship care experience loss, grief, trauma, attachment, identity, and belonging in ways that require specialized understanding and care. Yet the systems designed to support them too often operate in silos.
In a recent episode of Child Welfare Wonk’s WonkCast: People Power Policy, C.A.S.E. Co-Founder and CEO Debbie Riley shares what happens when mental health and child welfare systems do not recognize and properly treat the complexity of these experiences and what it will take to build systems that respond differently.
Adoption-Competent Care Is More Than Understanding—It Requires Specialized Skills and Access
Adoption-competent mental health care requires more than awareness of adoption. It requires specialized knowledge and skills and meaningful access to the right care at the right time.
As Debbie emphasizes during the podcast discussion, expertise only matters if families can access it.
Adoption-competent care must be available, accessible, and affordable so families can receive support before challenges become crises.
Mental Health and Child Welfare Cannot Operate as Separate Systems
Children and families are experiencing their needs holistically while the systems surrounding them including child welfare, behavioral health, Medicaid, and other services often remain fragmented and siloed.
Legal permanency is an important outcome, but permanency alone does not guarantee family well-being. Families also need access to specialized mental health support that can help them navigate the experiences that accompany adoption, foster care, and kinship care.
The challenge and the opportunity are to build systems around the needs of children and families rather than asking families to navigate the gaps between systems.
“Permanency and mental health are inseparable.”
Debbie Riley, LCMFT
C.A.S.E. CEO
From Listening to Families to Changing Systems
C.A.S.E.’s work began by listening to children, families, and people with lived experience and responding to what they told us they needed.
Over the last 25+ years, those lessons helped C.A.S.E. and our partners define what adoption-competent practice looks like, build a body of evidence on its effectiveness, and develop scalable approaches to training the workforce. Today, we are using that knowledge to influence systems and policy and practice nationally. As host Zach Laris describes it, C.A.S.E. is helping to “build the field of adoption competent mental health.”
Today, C.A.S.E. is working to take those lessons beyond individual providers and into the systems themselves: workforce development, financing, referral pathways, practice standards, and policy.
Systems change should ultimately mean that what families told us they needed decades ago becomes something every child and family can expect to receive. Lived experience identified the need; our responsibility is to ensure systems respond to it.
From Awareness to Action
We know more than ever about what works. Now the opportunity is to build that knowledge into the systems that serve children and families.
That means embedding adoption competency into:
- Policy and Advocacy
- Workforce Development
- Child Welfare and Behavioral Health Collaboration
- Medicaid (and other financing structures)
- Referral Pathways
The goal is not simply to help families find the right provider. It is to create systems in which adoption-competent mental health care is an expected, accessible part of supporting children and families regardless of where they live.
Building the Future of Adoption-Competent Mental Health
C.A.S.E. is committed to helping lead the next chapter of this work, bringing together youth and families with lived experience, mental health and child welfare professionals, researchers, funders, policymakers, advocates, and partners to build systems that better meet the needs of children and families.
What families told us they needed decades ago should not depend on whether they happen to find the right provider today. Our opportunity is to make adoption-competent care something every child and family can expect to receive.
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For additional questions about press & media, please contact Hilary Forslund, Chief Engagement + Advancement Officer at forslund@adoptionsupport.org.
