Robin P. McHaelen, MSW
Friday, October 16, 2026
9 am – 12 pm
Virtual
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

This program provides 3 hours of content on cultural competency.

LGBTQ+ people —transgender and non-binary people in particular — are navigating an increasingly hostile policy environment. Since early 2025, a series of federal executive orders, agency guidance changes, and enforcement actions have targeted gender-affirming care access, military service, federal identity documents, and civil rights protections for transgender people, while dozens of states have independently enacted restrictions on healthcare, school participation, and legal recognition. For LGBTQ+ individuals, their families, and the clinicians, educators, and caregivers who support them, this is a period of significant and compounding stress.

This 3-hour webinar equips participants with two complementary, evidence-based frameworks for understanding and responding to this moment. Ilan Meyer’s Minority Stress Model provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how stigma, discrimination, and anticipated rejection translate into measurable mental health disparities for sexual and gender minorities — and how distal stressors (like policy and legislation) interact with proximal, internalized stress processes. Caitlyn Ryan’s Family Acceptance Project (FAP) framework offers a practical, research-based model for helping social workers and clinicians move family and caregiver behavior along the acceptance-rejection continuum, even when starting from a place of ambivalence or discomfort.

Building on these frameworks, the webinar devotes focused attention to the current federal and state policy landscape affecting transgender and non-binary people specifically — including restrictions on gender-affirming care, military service, federal documentation, and Title IX protections, alongside the record volume of state-level legislation — and translates this landscape into practical clinical and caregiving guidance. Participants will leave with concrete language, screening considerations, and support strategies for working with LGBTQ+ clients and their families during a period of acute, ongoing systemic stress.

This webinar is designed for mental health clinicians, social workers, school counselors, healthcare providers, case managers, and other professionals who work with LGBTQ+ individuals and families. It is grounded in current, evolving policy conditions; because this is a fast-moving area, participants are encouraged to treat the specific legal/policy examples as illustrative of a broader pattern rather than a final or exhaustive accounting.

By the end of this seminar, participants will be able to:

• Explain the core components of Meyer’s Minority Sexual/Gender Minority Stress Model.
• Identify how current federal and state policy actions function as distal minority stressors, describe their documented associations with anxiety, depression, and other mental health outcomes and identify potential interventions
• Describe the Family Acceptance Project’s continuum of caregiver behaviors, using an intersectional lens to distinguish specific accepting and rejecting behaviors and their impact on outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth and adults.
• Apply FAP-informed communication strategies to help ambivalent, uncertain, or struggling caregivers move toward more accepting behaviors, even when they hold personal, cultural, or religious reservations.
• Assess for signs of minority stress, hypervigilance, and policy-related anticipatory anxiety in LGBTQ+ clients, with particular attention to the compounded burden on transgender and non-binary clients navigating an active and changing legal landscape.
• Recognize the importance of remaining current on the fast-changing federal and state policy landscape and identify reliable sources (e.g., legal advocacy organizations, medical associations, state-specific trackers) for ongoing monitoring beyond the seminar.

Welcome 2 Reality
Tues, October 13, 2026
6 pm – 8 pm
2 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

This program provides 2 hours of content on cultural competence.

This training will focus on the depiction of black males in today’s world. The issues Black males go through and face. The cultural mistrust which influences perceptions and the quality of their relationships. Recognizing Black males varies in their individual needs and identifying supports that might be most effective. Consider how efforts to adequately provide for Black males can be linked to the fight for larger social justice goals for themselves and their communities.

Participants will:

• explore their knowledge base around historic and current systematic oppression and implicit bias and the physical and mental health impact it has on Black males
• identify unconscious cultural responses to mental health
• improve culturally specific skills to work with the Black male population more effectively
• learn skills to support in the healing of the Black male

Regina Lester-Harriat, LMSW, Assistant Professor in-Residence
Mon, October 5, 2026
9 am – 12 pm
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Practicum Instructors

Webinar link will be included in your confirmation email.

Understanding children’s behavior through a neuroscience-informed lens is an important first step. The next challenge is translating that understanding into sustainable practices that shape everyday experiences for children, families, and school communities.

This interactive workshop builds upon current research in neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma-informed practice to help participants move beyond understanding behavior toward creating the relational, emotional, and environmental conditions that support regulation, belonging, and healthy development.

Participants will explore how everyday interactions, relationships, routines, and environments influence children’s nervous system regulation and developing sense of safety, connection, and identity. Through guided reflection, case application, and concrete planning, participants will examine how adults across school communities can cultivate conditions that promote resilience, strengthen relationships, and support positive developmental outcomes.

Grounded in school social work practice and designed for immediate application, this workshop emphasizes accessible, evidence-informed approaches that participants can integrate into existing systems without relying on costly programs or extensive new resources.

Participants will discover how to translate neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma-informed knowledge into everyday practices that help adults intentionally create the relational, emotional, and environmental conditions in which children and the adults who care for them experience regulation, belonging, and the opportunity to thrive.

Participants will be able to:
1. Apply neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma-informed principles to design relational and environmental practices that support regulation and belonging.
2. Evaluate how everyday interactions, routines, and school environments influence children’s developing nervous systems and sense of safety.
3. Integrate relationship-centered strategies that strengthen co-regulation, resilience, and positive developmental outcomes.
4. Develop approaches that become embedded within psychologically safe learning environments without requiring extensive financial or organizational resources.
5. Create an individualized action plan for implementing manageable relationship-centered practices that foster regulation, belonging, and healthy development within their professional setting.

Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.ED

Wednesday, July 29, 2026
10 am – 12 pm (ET)
Live Webinar
2 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Magical Thinking, the cognitive process of assigning direct cause and effect to life events, was once thought to only occur in young childhood. Recent research supports that Magical Thinking is present throughout the lifespan, especially when we are confronted with traumatic and/or grief events. This workshop will explore how the Magical Thinking of traumatic events in childhood forges a narrative of self-blame that the child brings into adulthood. We will explore how to clinically expose the destructive self-blame stories that clients have carried within themselves. We will explore ways to assist clients in reconstructing their narratives. This workshop will also examine elements of Magical Thinking that child perpetrators use to manipulate their victims into silence. Lastly, we will discuss the tendency for traumatically grieved clients to re-employ Magical Thinking in their guilt and shock over the deaths of loved ones.

Please note: This workshop will contain content regarding childhood sexual abuse and suicide.

Learning objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify Magical Thinking throughout the lifespan
2. Participants will learn how to assist clients in reframing narratives that have been distorted by Magical Thinking Cause and Effect beliefs.
3. Participants will understand the role of Magical Thinking in the cognitive processing of grief.