We used a few theories from academic literature to help guide us. These include:  

Child rights
For many years now, the United Nations (UN) has been concerned with the rights of young people as well as adults. With this in mind, the UN has adopted a Convention on the Rights of the Child, which emphasizes the responsibility of the State to protect minors (up to the age of 18) and to ensure their well-being in all aspects of their lives. The child’s best interests must take priority in all measures concerning him or her. 

Intersectionality
This term is used to think about and understand how various aspects of individual identity – including race, gender, class, and sexuality – interact to create unique experiences of privilege or oppression. 

Resilient organizations
Offers a flexible conceptual framework for a systemic, interdependent, and interactional understanding of how people and organizations function, and positively adapt, in the face of adversity or perturbation. It guides our research by asking how do our mental health and child services systems adapt? How do the organizations, and the people within them, overcome adversity? 

What is mental health recovery?
Generally, mental health recovery emphasizes the importance of diverse person-focused, community-based, and strength-based approaches to attend to the unicity of individual experiences. Core components of a successful recovery-oriented mental health care service include fostering participation, offering hope, engaging in holistic approaches and personalized interventions, emphasizing mutual aid and peer support, increasing choice, and promoting active citizenship.