This article draws on Indigenous literature to develop a conceptual framework that makes visible Indigenous child wellbeing. A process of qualitative content analysis identified and examined the core concepts and mechanisms of Indigenous wellbeing. Central to the framework is the concept of connectedness. The premise of this article is that deepening our understanding of Indigenous connectedness can assist with the restoration of knowledge and practices that promote child wellbeing. When children are able to engage in environmental, community, family, intergenerational and spiritual connectedness, this contributes to a synergistic outcome of collective wellbeing. The Indigenous Connectedness Framework may be particularly useful to Indigenous communities that directly serve children. The hope is that communities can adapt the Indigenous Connectedness Framework to their particular history, culture, stories, customs and ways of life.

Globally, Indigenous communities, leaders, mental health providers, and scholars have called for strengths-based approaches to mental health that align with Indigenous and holistic concepts of health and wellness. We applied the Indigenist Ecological Systems Model to strengths-based case examples of Indigenous youth mental health and wellness work occurring in CANZUS (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and United States). The case examples include research, community-led programs, and national advocacy. Indigenous youth development and well-being occur through strengths-based relationships across interconnected environmental levels. This approach promotes Indigenous youth and communities considering complete ecologies of Indigenous youth to foster their whole health, including mental health. Future research and programming will benefit from understanding and identifying common, strengths-based solutions beyond narrow intervention targets. This approach not only promotes Indigenous youth health and mental health, but ripples out across the entire ecosystem to promote community well-being.

Youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood access and succeed in college at much lower rates than the general population. A variety of services exist to support youth with their postsecondary goals, but few if any have evidence for their effectiveness. As part of a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded intervention development project to design Fostering Higher Education, a structured, testable postsecondary access and retention intervention for youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood, focus groups were conducted with community stakeholders to collect recommendations for how to most effectively structure the intervention. Analyses of focus group findings resulted in four theme groups: (1) general recommendations for intervention development; (2) recommendations for an educational advocacy intervention component; (3) recommendations for a mentoring intervention component; and (4) recommendations for a substance abuse prevention intervention component. These themes offered a variety of important insights for developing interventions in a way that is usable for youth and feasible for communities to implement.

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Recent anti-racist, equity, and social justice discourse in child welfare has centered on a restructured, reimagined, or abolished system. We add our scholarship and recommendations to this discourse by focusing on Alaska Native and African American children because these two populations have had an ongoing disproportionate number of children in out-of-home care. We provide an overview of the history that implicates western-based colonial policies and practices. We have also identified how a system invested in child removal is problematic and discuss what attempts have been made to change child welfare. We propose a framework to guide systems change within child welfare that is rooted in connectedness. The hope is that the application of this framework can improve outcomes for children and families of color.