Ranger – The Cherokee County Department of Social Services became the only DSS agency in North Carolina to achieve national site certification in the evidence based foster care model – Together Facing The Challenge.
“This is a huge step for us” Director Amanda McGee said. “It has taken two years and an extraordinary amount of teamwork with our foster families, permanency planning social workers, and our county leadership to make this happen.”
Together Facing the Challenge is a program under the leadership of Maureen Murray, LCSW, within the Services Effectiveness Research Program in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine.
It was developed as a collaborative effort between Maureen Murray, Betsy Farmer, PhD, and Barbara J. Burns, PhD, and is based on nine years of treatment foster care studies.
The model is trauma informed and helps social workers and caregivers better understand the strengths and needs of children in foster care, and effective methods of responding to children when they are in a state of emotional discomfort and are demonstrating challenging behaviors.
Since Cherokee County implemented the model in 2020, DSS has been able to keep children stable in foster homes without disruptions that would have been typical prior to implementation. This is largely due to the extreme skill, patience and dedication our foster parents have for the children we serve, and the DSS social workers who work side by side with our foster parents. Keeping children stable in one loving home helps them heal faster, and children are reunified or achieve another permanent home more quickly.
Hope Beckham, a lead social worker, along with other team members, took the lead in implementation, McGee said. “This would never have become a reality without the dedication of the social work team and our amazing foster family group.”
DSS is recruiting foster parents to become part of this initiative and provide a safe home for a foster child. For details, call Beckham at 837-7455, Ext. 1266.