MANCHESTER, NH – Elizabeth Karaim always knew she wanted to help children and families.
Through the Parent Leadership Training Institute (PLTI) – a civic engagement program for parents and members of the community who wish to improve childhood outcomes through advocacy – Karaim was able to acquire the skills necessary to bring needed change to her community.
For her, this means incorporating social emotional learning competencies into family services and resources.
Social emotional intelligence is something Karaim has worked to improve in her own personal life.
After losing her husband in 2021, Karaim left Florida for New Hampshire the following year, where she became pregnant with twins. Due to difficulties finding housing and spending two weeks in the hospital for a mental health crisis, her twins were put in the placement of the care of DCYF.
Having complex PTSD from a difficult experience with DCYF in Florida, Karaim said she expected the experience in New Hampshire to be similar.
“I didn’t have the social emotional intelligence to realize it was different here. I was just going off the strong emotions I had from [Florida],” she said. “It was a lot to go through. I didn’t know which end was up when they threatened to take my children. I’ve overcome a lot of things in my life, and the one thing I knew that I couldn’t do was risk losing my children again.”
After finding housing, Karaim was reunited with her children eight months later in August 2024. From there, she became a parent leader with DCYF’s Better Together program, through which she received the State of New Hampshire DCYF Exemplary Lived Experience Leadership & Service Award at the DCYF 2025 conference for her engagement with the department, her reunification success, and her drive to make change.
“It means someone was paying attention to the hard work I was doing to provide a better life for my family, and that attention was new to me,” she said. “It can feel very defeating to have children in placement, and that is amazing. To know that for a second, I was being the change I want to see in the world and I was honored for that brought me over the moon with joy.”
Through Better Together, Karaim gained community. She met a foster parent who had graduated from the first PLTI cohort at Manchester Community College, and referred Karaim to the second cohort.
“PLTI was one of the greatest things that I ever did. It was very informative. I learned so much in the twenty-one weeks that we went and I gained some real bonds that I don’t think I otherwise would have had access to,” she said. “I gained a lot of skills, and I also found a lot of shortcomings that I didn’t realize that I had. So for me, it was really [about] finding who I was as a mom and as a person, and I learned a lot about the system that I didn’t know.”
While researching for her PLTI project, Karaim was accepted into a 12-week medical assistance program with Dartmouth. Through the program, she learned about social emotional learning, and how it is being used in the military and Fortune 500 companies.
“There’s really nothing out there for parents or for children to teach social emotional skills. It’s not really at the forefront of anything. And a lot of people who have gone through traumas have a hard time developing themselves emotionally and socially, that’s kind of where they get stuck,” she said. “Why isn’t this being taught more in the family unit, at the ground level?”
Karaim decided to use her PLTI project to do this herself, and bring these social emotional core competencies to families through support groups and preexisting family service programs.
In the fall she plans to start a support group at Life Church in Manchester for people of all ages and walks of life to get different perspectives and work on the competencies. She hopes to use the information gathered from the support group to present at the state and national level to have social emotional learning incorporated into existing family engagement and children’s programs, such as Better Together.
She also hopes to continue to have support groups for those who need it.
“I don’t know where this project will lead me, but I just do the best I can. I’ve been through a lot, but I try to adapt and overcome the things that I have to,” Karaim said. “As much as I’ve learned, I don’t know how to hand off the information to other people to make their lives easier, so [that’s] what I’m trying to do.”