Youth & Family Specialist

Location:

Lighthouse at Ascentria, 18 Chestnut Street, Suite 410, Worcester, MA 01608, USA

Ascentria Care Alliance has been transforming underserved communities for over 150 years, providing a wide range of services to children, families, and seniors across five states. Recognized as one of the largest human services nonprofits in New England and one of the top 100 women-led businesses in Massachusetts, we envision vibrant communities where all individuals have access to resources to support one another to overcome challenges and seize opportunities.

The Youth and Family Specialist can serve dual roles in the Child and Family Services because the work supporting youth in home-like settings and achieving permanency, and the work of recruiting and supporting families, needs to be a shared responsibility across the team. Each youth and each foster family will have their own Youth and Family Specialist with differing roles. Both roles require close collaboration with school personnel and educational teams, child welfare staff, Family Networks lead agencies, therapists, lawyers and court personnel, the general public and intra-agency collaterals.

• Demonstrate a human-centered, strength-based, and trauma-informed philosophy by treating all clients, families and collaterals in a non-judgmental and respectful manner while building on their strengths.
• Create a trusting and safe relationship with the client and encourages personal growth of the client.
• Advocate for the youth’s needs to ensure equitable and quality care.
• Provide clinical case management working in multiple systems and settings providing services to foster children, foster families and biological families.
• Depending on level of training, provide group and/or individual counseling and coaching services, mediation and guidance to children and their biological and/or foster families.
• Facilitate supervised family visits, and provides parent coaching as appropriate.
• Consistently demonstrate discretion and independent judgment with regard to assessing and making decisions around the best interest for children and families.
• Undertake the responsibility of “on-call” duty as assigned and is responsive to crises independently either by phone and/or in person, demonstrating a calm and professional approach while assuring safety for all involved.
• Facilitate treatment meetings/ foster care review, and invites the appropriate attendees, while ensuring effective interagency collaboration.
• Coordinate dental, medical, psychological and community support for youth.
• Ensure that educational needs are met including advocacy for special education services.
• Attend all meetings called by collaterals and support a team approach to best serve the needs of children, youth and families.
• Support and participate in the development and implementation of strategic plans for program-specific foster care recruitment in conjunction with foster care recruitment across the Children and Families Service.
• Recruit qualified foster homes on a continuous basis to meet the growing and challenging needs of clients.
• Support foster families through the recruitment and training process.
• Participate in “matching process” and prepares foster parents for their work with the child/youth and family of origin.
• Promote the program through community networking and positive representation to internal and external committees, government entities, etc.
• Maintain an excellent relationship with state or private funding sources and other state authorities responsible for regulating foster homes or child placing agencies.
• Develop and maintain expertise regarding regulatory requirements for foster parent qualification and renewal including record checks, evaluations and updating of file materials.
• Complete all documentation required by state licensing regulations in a timely manner, including but not limited to home studies, background checks, annual foster care review and waivers.
• Perform other related duties incidental to the work described herein to help meet the goals of the program or the agency.
• Document all contacts and incidents and ensure files are up to date.
• Develop and complete…