Webinar: Building Resilience & Protective Factors in Adoptive Families, CE – Eligible

Building Resilience & Protective Factors in Adoptive Families, CE – eligible under Pact, an Adoption Alliance CAMFT Provider #131157

Professionals who serve adoptive parents often encounter them in a state of stress, anxiety, frustration, or even crisis. Supporting them requires not just attending to their immediate challenges, but helping them understand that what they’re experiencing is often normal in the context of adoption. By shifting expectations, you can help them regain a sense of agency by parenting from their values, strengthening empathy for their child, and committing to child-centered actions to reduce stress and improve family functioning. For professionals who work with adoptive parents.

CE Learning Goals:

1. Identify 3 common dynamics experienced by adoptive families post-placement
2. Describe how to use parenting values clarification to help adoptive parents make child-centered decisions in moments of stress
3. Explain how they would teach empathy tools for adoptive parents to reduce their stress and increase understanding of the child
4. Describe how they will teach adoptive parents to identify and commit to one child-centered action they can take to reduce stress and improve functioning in the family.

Special pricing for this event of $30 includes CE certificate for those who qualify. Member discount is not available for this webinar, as the special pricing already includes the discount. 

Presenter: Susan DG Leksander, (she/her), LMFT, Executive Director, Pact, an Adoption Alliance. Susan is a Latina first mother and transracial domestic adoptee. A licensed psychotherapist specializing in the adoption and foster care triads, she joined Pact in 2016 as a parent consultant, first/birth family advocate, and coordinator of trainings for service providers. When Pact became a licensed adoption agency in 2017, Susan was appointed its founding Agency & Clinical Director. She launched Pact’s Center for Race & Adoption Focused Therapy (CRAFT) in 2021, and was selected as Pact’s second Executive Director in 2025. An experienced educator and presenter, she previously served as Board President of MPower Alliance. She is raising two sons and is on an ongoing journey of reunion with her first families and the daughter she placed for adoption.

Target Audience: LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, LEPs, and professionals who work with the adoption constellation. Course meets the qualifications for hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences.

Pre-adoptive, adoptive/foster parents and adoption constellation members are welcome to attend.

Pact, an Adoption Alliance is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs and LEPs. LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs and LEPs. Pact, an Adoption Alliance maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content ”

Please request any accommodations for disabilities by October 25, 2026. Grievances should be directed to education@pactadopt.org by December 31, 2026.

CE certificates will be issued within 1 week after applicants complete the course evaluation. The evaluation will be shared with participants by 5 pm PT on the day of the webinar presentation. CE applicants must complete evaluations within 10 calendar days of the live event.