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Date & Time: Original Live Event Zoom on Friday, January 16th, 2026 from 12:00 – 1:00 PM CST
Recording available until July 16, 2026
Presenter: Hopewell Hodges, MA, PhD Candidate — Predoctoral Psychology Internat the University of Minnesota
When our communities experience violence and fear, children and the adults who care for them carry that weight. At Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health, our values remain clear and unwavering: every child, caregiver and family deserves safety, dignity, and care. We know trauma has ripple effects in our communities, and it is our collective responsibility to respond with accountability, compassion, and support.
Registration for this training will follow a pay-what-you-can model. Contributions will go directly to supporting reflective practice groups for professionals, many of whom are supporting and holding space for the children and families impacted by immigration enforcement operations. 
Description of Presentation:
Many children from immigrant and refugee families have loved ones at risk of deportation. For these children, immigration enforcement operations in a community can pose a risk to mental health and development. Fortunately, supportive adults in a child’s life can play a large role in protecting children’s mental health and promoting positive development. 
This training offers concrete strategies that adults can use to support children during periods of uncertainty and fear. Drawn from the field of developmental resilience science and informed by clinical practice, these strategies leverage ordinary resources around a child — most importantly, the presence of caring adults — and can be applied by anyone in service to children, including parents, educators, clinicians, and community leaders. Attendees will learn skills for communicating with children about immigration enforcement, restoring predictability and safety, promoting agency, and, most importantly, listening well. 
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this training attendees will be able to:
Articulate children’s core developmental needs amid fears of a loved one’s detention or deportation
Implement practical strategies to support children who are afraid of a caregiver’s detention or deportation, as well as those whose caregiver has been arrested
Advocate for the needs of children and families affected by immigration enforcement operations
 

Price: 
Our Pay What You Can pricing is rooted in our commitment to equity, accessibility, and community care. We want everyone to feel welcome to join this popup training—no one should be excluded because of cost. Base price $20
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About the Presenter: Hopewell R. Hodges is a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s joint-track doctoral program in developmental psychology and clinical psychology, advised by Drs. Ann Masten and Saida Abdi. She conducts community-engaged research focused on positive development in young people exposed to multisystem adversities like forced displacement and housing loss. Because young people’s health depends to such a large extent on the functioning of surrounding systems, Hopewell focuses much of her attention on building the capacity of the adult world to respond sensitively and creatively to children’s needs using locally effective resilience mechanisms. Her clinical work with children and families exposed to trauma often relies on a similar lens of multisystem resilience. With Dr. Charles Oberg, she co-authored a book, Global Impacts on Childhood Social Development: Building Resilience Amid Conflict, Environmental Degradation, and Climate Change, published December 2025. 
Hopewell holds both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in literature from Yale University, both of which focused on communities’ responses to collective trauma like war, genocide, and colonization. She is completing her clinical internship at the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis.