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

Youth Thrive Origins and Framework 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 (Courtney, 2009) and to capitalize on the inherent strengths that exist in these youth. 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 Act1 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. Recently there has also been a growing belief in communities and among child welfare and youth services experts as to the value of practitioners dealing with both risk factors that compromise a child’s life prospects (e.g., family violence) and protective and promotive factors (e.g., resilience, social connections) that minimize risk and advance well-being (Epstein, 2004). By drawing attention to the importance of balancing attention to risk reduction with that of the promotion of health, the Youth Thrive Framework is consistent with the tenets