Professional Programs

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Owner and director of Perspectives, Laura Vargas, has years of experience engaging, motivating, and teaching students, employees, and agencies. If you are looking for help training your employees or you would like to do something special for your staff, send us a message and we can design a training, in-service, or team-building event made special for you.

Some popular presentations have been:

Self-Care is so important! In 2021, language about self-care was added to the NASW Code of Ethics. This 1/2 day in services will discuss compassion fatigue in the helping profession where participants will assess their own self-care. Participants leave the presentation with their own complete, personalized vision board.

We are not automatically born to be resilient; we develop resilience over time with experiences that are both happy and, at times, tragic. We are moving into a post-pandemic world that is bringing change which may or may not be desirable. This workshop will allow time to define, explore and identify your own resilience. Resilience and protective factors go hand in hand, so this workshop also discusses what may qualify as a protective factor, and how we can build on our current protective factors to help develop new ones for coping with our ever-changing world. If you want to slow down, give yourself time to process what you have been through, and also plan for the future, you are going to enjoy this workshop!

If you are a child welfare agency and you want to improve your client engagement skills and increase your permanency rate with clients - this is the training for you. We will discuss the stages of assessment that continue through the life of a DCFS case and the importance of addressing underlying conditions that often bring families to the attention of DCFS. Hands-on practice will occur during the workshop on how to apply existing DCFS assessment tools that support the safety, permanency, and well-being of children who are in the care of DCFS.

If you are a CASA agency or a foster care support group, this training will provide participants with the opportunity to understand how and why a child enters the child welfare system. The Juvenile Court Act and the policy and procedure of DCFS will be discussed.

This training is for anyone who wants to learn more about how childhood trauma can affect a child at home, in school, and in daycare settings. Strategies on how to support children will be provided. This training focuses on the effects of childhood trauma on children and adolescents,  child trauma theories, the impact of trauma and loss, and the assessment and intervention of traumatized children will be explored. Factors such as therapeutic relationships, working with caregivers, self-care for social workers and the critical need for supervision will be examined. Skills will be developed to directly treat children of trauma to assist with the management of their symptoms, healing from trauma/loss of memories, and increasing coping skills to prepare for future challenges.