9:00 am - 12:00 pm

Megan MacLeod
Clinical Social Worker BA, BSW

(Beausejour Room)

Nurturing Health and Growth in Both Caregiver and Child – From the Ground Up
The journey of creating permanency for children and youth is more than opening our homes and hearts — it’s about helping them grow steady after being uprooted by trauma, loss, and change. Many children and youth who enter permanent families through adoption, foster care, or kinship care have had their early roots disrupted — the very foundations of safety, trust, and identity.

In this session, we’ll look at how parents and caregivers  and professionals can be a safe ground where children can begin to re-root: growing new connections, restoring a sense of stability, and developing the resilience they need to thrive. Through evidence-based approaches, stories, practical tools, and reflection, we’ll explore how strong relational roots — grounded in empathy, attunement, and consistency — are the starting place for healing.

Come join us in this shared learning space as we explore what it means to nurture health and growth in both caregiver and child – from the ground up.

1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Johanne Lemieux
Social Worker and Psychotherapist

(Beausejour Room)

CULTIVATING ATTACHMENT:

Or the art of being a parent-gardener throughout the life of our adopted child! 

Adoption has often been compared to grafting or uprooting a small plant and then replanting it in new soil. These are both powerful metaphors, but too often they remain incomplete stories; we forget to follow through. It is not simply a matter of taking a plant and placing it in good soil, cutting off a branch and tying it to another tree, and voila, nature will do the rest without any external input or effort. This widespread myth causes much disappointment and unjustly unnecessary suffering. This presentation is intended as a practical antidote to these beliefs, so that all caregivers become increasingly competent gardeners to decode and care for this precious plant.