Child & Family Research Network | Care-to-Share
Care-to-Share
The CTS is a Carolina Network that brings together faculty from UNC Greensboro and UNC Chapel Hill along with community partners to address issues that matter most to children, youth, families and the institutions that serve them. CTS events are open to scholars and community members across the triangle and triad regardless of discipline and organizational affiliation. To learn more about Care-to-Share NC, contact us at cfrn@uncg.edu.
In the 1980s, university scholars across the research triangle created a community for training and research that contributed to the birth of Developmental Science – now a rich multi-disciplinary field with implications for children, youth, families, and those who serve them. Building on these roots, we formed the Care-to-Share network. Care-to-Share is an academic-community partnership designed to synthesize diverse perspectives on issues impacting child and youth welfare and to communicate lessons learned with key stakeholders regarding pressing concerns, prioritized needs, acquired strengths, available resources, and required supports.
To fulfill this mission, Care-to-Share gathers researchers and community providers (including teachers, policy advocates, health care providers, and others) to meet repeatedly throughout the academic year and to exchange views on a pressing issue in child welfare, to examine this issue from many perspectives, and to synthesize what the group has learned for broader dissemination.
Past Events
In October 2023, a Care-To-Share Dinner Meeting convened, facilitating discourse among prominent stakeholders from UNCG and UNC-CH faculty who have historically participated in the CTS Carolina Seminar. The gathering aimed to delve into the current and perennial concerns confronting the academic sphere regarding community-engaged research within Developmental Science.
In February of 2024, Extending Community-Engaged Developmental Science Across North Carolina was held. In this hybrid event, presenters integrated methods of community-engaged scholarship with the field of Developmental Science. More than the study of children, Developmental Science concerns how people grow and change across the lifespan, contexts that support development and creating interventions to promote resilience and thriving. In this workshop, participants discussed the opportunities of this integration, heard lessons from scholars seasoned in this work, learned about new collaborations from the viewpoint of community partners and emerging scholars and tried out tools likely to help both scholars and community partners in North Carolina build successful relationships.
In October of 2022, Resilience and Recovery for Youth and Children in the Time of COVID was held. Dr. Andrea Hussong (UNC-CH) presented on the work of the Care-to-Share Network and on Resilience and Recovery for Youth and Children in the time of COVID. The presentation was in-person on the UNC-Greensboro campus and livestreamed to any interested participants. Because we value community engagement and networking, we spent time after the presentation in conversation with one another (both in-person and via zoom), with a reception that followed. The event was free and open to all academic or community members, although registration was required for internet security.
In February of 2023, we held the Spring Mini-Conference. In the prior three years, societal stress and trauma exposure became even more rampant. Although children, youth, and families struggled with increasing mental health, academic, and developmental challenges, scholars and those working with youth in our communities noted some silver linings and evidence of resilience. Understanding how children, youth, families, and the institutions who served them weathered times of crisis and strain and recovered in the face of challenge was key to supporting children. Attention to cultural variation and how such challenges were compounded for children and youth from marginalized communities was essential to identifying key developmental processes that informed the next generation of prevention, intervention, and educational programming. Our presenters addressed these issues, and our participants convened to consider how they could contribute to this work in their own research.
May of 2023 brought the Care-to-Share Event with El Futuro. We invited valued partners to a collaborative learning and planning gathering at El Futuro’s Durham Clinic. In the meeting, Dr. Prandoni shared El Futuro’s ongoing work in both direct delivery of evidence-based practices as well as training efforts aimed at reducing research-to-practice gaps and professional pipeline issues among Latine providers across the state. We then met in break-out groups to define mutually beneficial research/publication/clinical collaborations that will serve to address these issues while also elevating El Futuro’s work and its mission of becoming a National Resource Center for other community mental health centers to follow.
Throughout the fall of 2021 through the spring of 2022, we met several times as a working group to discuss what types of resources, policies, programs, materials, and practices were needed to support youth mental health at that time. We discussed how to discuss the strengths and supports or silver linings experienced by youth in the pandemic, and produced our first White Paper, seen at left.