Foster Care Family Support Manager

Description

Job Title:

Family Support Manager

FLSA Status:
Full-Time/Salaried/Exempt

Reports To:

Director of Family Engagement and Support

Location:

Remote within South Carolina

The Family Support Manager leads Growing Hope’s foster family support program and supervises Family Support Specialists (FSS) who provide direct support to the foster families we license and support. This is a relationship-centered leadership role responsible for building a stable, consistent, and equity-driven support system that helps children remain safe and stable in family homes, strengthens foster parents’ confidence and capacity, and ensures staff have the tools, coaching, and structure needed to do high-quality work.

This position is intentionally designed to collaborate and co-design with the Director of Family Engagement and Support, as we build a comprehensive family support model. The Manager will instill Growing Hope values, shape program expectations and engagement standards, update and assess workflows, training priorities, and stabilization strategies while anchoring the day-to-day support operations, especially when families call with urgent needs or when risk events emerge.

The Family Support Manager is also a first-line leader for foster parent concerns and emerging risk, supporting timely escalation, consistent decision-making, and follow-through while partnering closely with Licensing and Placement to prevent unnecessary disruptions and strengthen outcomes.

Placement stability is one of the most powerful protective factors we can influence for children and youth in foster care. Children thrive with consistency, predictability, and trusted adult attachment, and every move can increase risk and compound trauma, delays in permanency, and disruptions in school and relationships.

Foster parents are doing courageous work, often while navigating behaviors rooted in trauma, complicated systems, competing guidance, and the everyday pressure of trying to help a child feel safe in a new home. When support is fragmented, inconsistent, or reactive, families can feel alone, and the system becomes more crisis-driven than stability-focused. Child welfare guidance consistently emphasizes that caregivers need agency support to navigate systems, access services, and maintain their own wellbeing.

This role exists to mitigate the trauma of unmet needs of children in foster care by ensuring every child or youth placed with a Growing Hope family is in a safe, well-trained, well-supported, and committed foster home, with our team of professionals and resources by their side. With a comprehensive family support model, we can:

• Keep children stable in homes, schools, and community connections whenever safely possible
• Strengthen foster parent retention through timely support, coaching, peer connection, and respite-informed planning
• Build a proactive stabilization model (not just crisis response) grounded in preparation, practical tools, and consistent follow-up
• Center equity and dignity, reducing bias in how risk, compliance, and ?t are interpreted and ensuring families get tailored support
• Prevent adoption disruption and dissolution by supporting families beyond permanency via routine check-ins and resource connection offerings to meet the needs of Growing Hope families in the months and years after permanency is achieved.

• Co-develop, with the Director, a clear Family Support & Stability program model that includes:

• Build and maintain infrastructure on how we support: checklists, templates, scripts, family resource guides, onboarding tools, and stabilization planning materials.
• Lead continuous improvement cycles: use family feedback, disruption/risk event debriefs, and outcome tracking to adjust practice and reduce recurring stressors.
• Develop role clarity and healthy cross-team boundaries so foster parents experience one coordinated system,…