Engaging Parents and Teens in Conversations Regarding Underage Drinking and Substance Use

Join Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to learn about our youth substance use prevention initiatives including both evidence-based and evidence-informed programs designed for teens and parents. Participants will receive an overview of MADD’s prevention services and experience a sample program that demonstrates how these approaches can support healthy decision making and reduce underage substance use.

Neuroscience of Leadership for Youth Professionals

This interactive workshop, Neuroscience of Leadership for Youth Professionals, is designed to help strengthen self-awareness, emotional regulation, and purposeful leadership. Grounded in neuroscience and Positive Intelligence principles, the session will explore how automatic reactions are formed and how leaders can shift from reactive patterns to thoughtful, values-driven responses. Participants will gain practical tools to better understand their internal responses, improve communication, and strengthen relationships within their leadership roles.

Peer Power: Teens Leading Prevention

This workshop will feature high school students from the West Hartford PHACTT program who will share their first- hand experiences developing marketing campaigns.  Participants will hear directly from the teens about the creative process, lessons learned and the impact their work has had on engaging their peers.

Preparing Youth for an AI World

Artificial intelligence is changing how young people learn, communicate, and solve problems. This session explores the impact of AI on youth development, identifies the skills that matter most in an AI-driven world, and shares practical strategies to help strengthen those skills through youth programming and everyday interactions. 

Trusted Adults Make a Difference: Youth and Domestic Violence

This training, delivered by the Prudence Crandall Center, gives providers and trusted adults a clear overview of domestic violence and its impact on youth. Topics include the full range of abuse — physical, sexual, financial, technological, and emotional/psychological — with a focus on coercive control as an intentional pattern of behavior. The training also covers barriers faced by underserved groups, including male victims and LGBTQIA+ youth, who often face added stigma and service gaps.

YSB of One, Community of Many: Expanding Capacity Through Partnerships and Shared Leadership

How can Youth Service Bureaus expand their impact when they don’t have more staff, more time, or more money? This interactive workshop explores how a “YSB of One” can become a community effort through collaboration, shared leadership, and creative use of existing resources. Presenters will share the Town of Tolland’s experience expanding prevention initiatives, youth engagement opportunities, mental health programming, and community outreach through partnerships between Youth Services, Human Services, schools, community organizations, and local stakeholders. Attendees will learn practical strategies for maximizing capacity, strengthening partnerships, and creating sustainable programming without relying solely on additional resources. Participants will leave with new ideas for identifying hidden assets within their own communities and building collaborative approaches to better support youth and families.

Lunch, Annual Meeting, Awards & Exhibits

Can We Trust Our Data? How Youth Feedback Is Changing Prevention Practice

Community prevention efforts often rely on youth survey data to guide decision-making, but meaningful youth engagement rarely extends beyond data collection. This interactive session explores how Thriving Youth Darien transformed a traditional survey presentation into a community dialogue where young people interpreted the findings, challenged assumptions, and helped shape future prevention efforts. Participants will learn practical strategies for engaging youth as partners in understanding prevention data, building trust in the survey process, and turning data into meaningful action within their own communities.

Community Building, Allyship & Being an Upstander: A Practical Framework for Having Uncomfortable Conversations Safely

How do you help a young person navigate a hard conversation about identity, bias, or exclusion – safely, without shutting it down or letting harm go unnamed? This interactive session gives youth-serving professionals a practical framework for facilitating difficult conversations, drawn from a full-day student conference model. Leave with concrete tools you can start building immediately in your own community.

I Said This, You Heard That: Understanding Temperaments to Strengthen Communication with Youth        

Every conversation shapes a relationship – but what if the problem isn’t what we say, but what others hear? In this engaging and practical workshop, participants will discover how understanding our innate temperaments can transform communication with youth, families, and colleagues. Based on Kathleen Edelman’s I Said This, You Heard That framework, attendees will identify their own temperament, learn to recognize the unique wiring of others, and gain practical tools to communicate more effectively, reduce misunderstandings, and build stronger, more trusting relationships. Participants will leave with strategies they can immediately apply to help the youth they serve thrive.

More Time for What Matters: AI for Youth Serving Professionals    

Documentation, communication, planning, reporting, and other administrative tasks are essential to delivering quality youth services, but they also take valuable time away from direct work with young people. This session explores practical ways AI can help reduce administrative work so more time can be spent supporting young people. Participants will leave with real-world ideas they can begin applying immediately.

The Shift: Practical Tools to Rescue Yourself from Burnout So That You Can Effect Change in the Teens and Families Who Need You Most    

You’ve been the steady one — the calm in the room for everyone else. But somewhere between the caseloads, the crises, and the conversations that don’t go the way you hoped, you lost yourself in the work. This experiential workshop is about the shift that changes everything: not a new intervention, but the personal transformation that lets you show up regulated, present, and effective even on your hardest days. Drawing from 25+ years of clinical practice and her own lived experience parenting an anxious teen, Marla Dakin, LCSW, Founder & Clinical Director of Farmington Valley Counseling Center, leads the room through her BEST Method — a 4-step self-regulation sequence (Breathe, Examine, Shift, Take Action) that turns popular tools (breath work, CBT, mindful moment, gratitude, perspective-taking) into one repeatable practice you can use in any moment of dysregulation. Participants will be moving, breathing, writing, and reflecting together, leaving with actionable strategies you can bring into your daily work with today’s youth.

LGBTQIA+ 101

Justin Zeigler’s “LGBTQIA+ 101” presentation provides a foundational overview of gender and sexual identity while equipping attendees with actionable steps for developing meaningful allyship. Drawing on his background as a certified Sexual Education Facilitator and YSB staff, Zeigler establishes group norms that encourage curiosity, sitting with discomfort, and mutual respect.

Core presentation themes include Terminology and Spectrums, Historical Context, Community Impact, Practical Allyship.

Break & Exhibits

Building Bridges in Prevention to Support Youth Across the Continuum of Care    

Understanding addiction as a pediatric-onset disorder underscores the importance of primary prevention and early intervention. With increasingly potent and dangerous substances accessible to youth, we must build new bridges in prevention across the continuum of care. Too often prevention and risk management are pitted against one another. This session addresses some of the misconceptions about each and emphasizes strategies to tailor prevention messages to youth and their caregivers based on their substance use experiences and risk. This session will provide attendees with research to push back against the false narrative that “youth substance use is inevitable” and to set a clear health standard of non-use before age 21, analogous to other health standards. We can create a culture of prevention, that both normalizes non-use while reducing stigma, and promoting help-seeking behaviors for youth and families across the continuum.

From Crisis to Connection: Building School-Community Partnerships That Improve Youth Mental Health Outcomes

Supporting youth mental health requires more than individual programs—it requires strong, coordinated partnerships. This interactive workshop explores how schools, Youth Service Bureaus, School-Based Health Centers, healthcare providers, families, and community organizations can work together to create comprehensive systems of support for young people. Participants will learn practical strategies for building sustainable partnerships, improving referral pathways, engaging youth as leaders in program design, and leveraging community resources to address emerging needs. Through a Connecticut-based case study, community mapping exercise, and action-planning activities, attendees will identify opportunities to strengthen collaboration in their own communities and leave with actionable steps to improve youth mental health outcomes and overall well-being.

Level-Up Love

Are you the person people turn to for advice? Do you notice when someone deserves better — even before they do? Or maybe you feel frustrated watching people navigate messy, confusing relationships and wish you could better support them. This workshop is for you. Join us for real, honest conversation facilitated by Interval House educators. No judgment. Just support, connection, and practical tools. Together, we’ll explore: How to recognize red flags and different forms of abuse (physical, emotional, digital, stalking); What healthy vs. unhealthy relationships actually look like; Ways to support someone experiencing an abusive relationship; Building self-love and showing up for the people you care about; This isn’t a lecture—it’s a conversation. You bring your voice, your experiences, and your questions.

Relationship ~ A Pillar of Youth Development

Strong, stable relationships are the cornerstone of healthy youth development. Yet many young people enter our programs carrying the effects of early developmental attachment disruption (EDADT) a trauma that often goes unseen but significantly shapes behavior, learning, and connection. This workshop brings together parent/caregiver insight, peer support advocacy, and youth perspective to illuminate how EDADT develops, how it shows up in daily practice, and how relationship‑centered approaches can transform outcomes.

Relationships That Build Assets: BBBSCT’s Approach to Youth-Centered Mentoring

Discover how Big Brothers Big Sisters of Connecticut has integrated Search Institute’s Developmental Assets and Developmental Relationships Frameworks into every stage of its Service Delivery Model to strengthen mentoring relationships and improve youth outcomes. This session will explore how BBBSCT translates research into everyday practice by equipping staff and mentors with practical, strengths-based strategies that intentionally build assets through relationship-centered match support. Participants will learn how developmental relationships can guide goal setting, support quality match conversations, and create meaningful opportunities for youth growth. Attendees will leave with adaptable tools and ideas for embedding asset-building into mentoring, youth development, and human service programs.

What Healing Looks Like: Tiffany’s Experience

This workshop features Tiffany, a speaker with Minding Your Mind’s Changing Minds: Stories Over Stigma program. Tiffany’s childhood was shaped by trauma, loss, bullying, DCF involvement, self-harm, and two suicide attempts. Diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder, her message is clear: healing is not a straight path, but it is always possible. In this workshop, Tiffany shares a personal narrative centered on healing, brought directly into schools and community groups for students and staff. This personal narrative breaks the silence around mental health stigma and sparks hope.

Adjournment