Crossnore Communities for Children to expand intensive family services to 11 more counties

A local nonprofit child welfare agency is expanding a program that helps kids at high risk of entering foster care stay with their families of origin.

A contract from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services will bring these efforts to 11 more counties. 

The program is called Homebuilders. It’s a model that’s used across the country. Crossnore Communities for Children in Winston-Salem was the first organization in North Carolina to implement it in 2021.

Crossnore's Senior Director of Prevention Services Angela Squire explained how it works. 

“The idea is instead of removing kids from the home, we put a support in the home," Squire said. "So our workers are in the homes with families about 10 hours a week for that four to six-week window to teach skills or to address issues that are putting them at risk of going into foster care.”

They work with only the most intense cases, meaning those in which the Department of Social Services is prepared to take custody of the children within 24 hours. 

This could be due to problems with cleanliness, truancy, or parental substance use. Homebuilders staff work to identify the risk factors, and connect families to the treatment and resources they need to address them. 

“If it's food scarcity, we're going to take them grocery shopping, and we're going to make sure they get connected to food banks ongoing," Squire said. "If it's homelessness, we're going to work with them on housing stability.”

Squire says they’ve had a 96% success rate, meaning those children avoided being placed in foster care, which she says can be a highly traumatic experience.

“You don't just lose your parents in those moments, you lose your home, you lose your pets, you lose your siblings sometimes, you lose your school," she said. "It's just trauma on top of the trauma. So we really want to help identify what are those families where that can be avoided.”

With the new contract to expand the program, NCDHHS estimates that Crossnore will serve 170 families each year. 

Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.