One novel idea: $100,000 pay for skilled parents.
No one enters the child welfare world looking to make a profit, says Brett Loftis, who leads North Carolina’s Crossnore Communities for Children.
As a business, it’s just a terrible idea.
“One of my board members, who is an investment banker, says no one would go into this if it were a business,” says Loftis. “There’s no money in it, no profit, and there are just these extreme headaches, trying to provide services for some of the most vulnerable people
in America.”
It’s ironic, then, that Loftis’s tenure at Crossnore has been marked by his work to make the 100-plus-year-old nonprofit run like a business. Since becoming CEO in December 2012, Loftis has transformed the child welfare organization.
Shortly after taking the reins, Loftis effected a merger with another icon of child-focused charity in North Carolina, the Children’s Home of Winston-Salem. That connection dramatically increased Crossnore’s size and scope; it now has 300 employees and an annual operating budget of $25 million.
Since the merger, Loftis has refocused the organization’s well-intentioned but
old-school operations.
At Crossnore’s 72-acre campus in rural Avery County, that meant expanding services to meet evolving needs. In Winston-Salem, he had to right a shaky financial ship and rebuild or, in some cases, tear down most of the 50-plus buildings on a sprawling campus.
A fundraising campaign co-chaired by Charlotte investment banker Charles Izard and Katheryn Northington, a non-profit consultant from Winston-Salem, is fueling the process. The Promise of Home campaign raised $53 million, which was $12 million above goal. A decision to place 93 of the 212 acres in an easement through the Piedmont Land Conservancy provided some cash to begin rebuilding, while preserving a patch of pastureland in the middle of a 253,000-population city.
Now, Loftis is turning his gaze to bigger game: fixing North Carolina’s broken child
welfare system.
Kids in North Carolina who lose their parents face a daunting path. These days, most of the breakups result from court-ordered terminations of custody; true orphans in the classic sense are rare.
The lucky kids are eventually reunited with their parents or other family members. Others wind up in residential settings like Crossnore, which houses about 135 kids at any given time, providing safety, stability and help for recovery and dealing with trauma. But Crossnore’s residential capacity is too small to make a dent in the 15,000 to 16,000 kids who pass through the state’s foster care system each year.
Consequently, many kids wind up pingponging around the system, going from home to home, sometimes even “living” briefly in county Department of Social Services buildings or within the healthcare system.
North Carolina’s foster system is managed by individual counties with state oversight. It’s the subject of regular lawsuits, including a new batch that popped up last year. The Jameson Case is in federal court, while the Timothy B case is in state court,
among others. The case files contain a litany of missed deadlines and failed service.
Loftis is a Wake Forest University law school graduate whose child welfare chops include a stint as the attorney, and later director, for the Charlotte-based Children’s Council. He predicts the plaintiffs will be victorious, once again.
“As a lawyer, I always won,” says Loftis. “Not because I was that great. But because (child welfare) laws were being violated (by governments and others) every single day. Of course I won.”
The problems are considerable, and the primary solution is obvious if not easily rectified. The system in the state is, he says, “just grossly undercapitalized.”
“As a result, [the system] is usually thinking about getting just enough for the child: a heated, indoor space where the kids are safe, and some food,” says Loftis. “But it doesn’t go much further than that.
“To kind of give you a value prop, it costs me more to board my dog than foster parents
get paid.”
Professional Parents
Fixing the system will require lots of work, and still more funding from a legislature that just added $835 million for mental health services, a chunk of which went to children’s services. A new bill passed by state lawmakers promises major reforms for the system, including more oversight of county Departments of Social Service by the state. But that doesn’t include much cash.
Innovation offers the best answer until more resources become available. An example is Crossnore’s Bridging Families foster care program, launched in 2023 with a $692,000 pilot program grant from the N.C. Department of Health and
Human Services.
Care for children who lost their parents in North Carolina and most other states has long relied on volunteers to provide much care.
The classic system works like this: foster parents (individuals or couples) volunteer to care for children in the volunteer’s home on a temporary basis. In return, they receive some training and professional support from their home county, and are paid a stipend from state and federal funds to cover the expense. North Carolina’s stipend, recently increased by the state legislature, runs between $702 and $846 a month, depending upon the age of the child. (Older kids and those with special needs receive more). Twice a year, a few additional dollars are available for clothes, along with a few other expenses.
North Carolina’s stipend ranks 17th in the country, well ahead of bottom-dweller Utah, which offers $187 a month.
Bridging Families inserts professional foster parents into the mix, which some view as a notable game changer. Although conventional, dedicated foster parents do yeoman’s work, caregivers in the new program are almost certainly more effective. They come to the job with extensive training and take care of the kids around the clock. It is, after all, their actual job.
An additional benefit: they also welcome birth parents into the mix as often as is possible. (Contact between birth parents whose parental rights have been terminated, and their children are regulated by the courts.) That helps teach parenting skills and improves the chance for reunification, which is the preferred outcome in most cases.
By contrast, most foster volunteers work for a living and then come home to parent. Training is minimal, and contact between birth parents and the foster family where their kids are housed is typically infrequent.
The professional parenting model creates an astounding dynamic, says Leslie Dulcos, who mans a Bridging Families home with her husband Kirk in Avery County.
“You’re just with them all the time, the kids, and, depending on the situation, the parents, too,” says Dulcos. Her first group of six weathered Hurricane Helene last September. “It was kind of scary at times, but (the children’s birth mom) got a lot of one-on-one, hands-on work, and it turned out to be a good thing.
“Mom is watching how we do things, picking up cues on that. We’re giving advice and we are really just involved with the whole family. It is a fantastic program that is actually working. That’s what drives us to do this.”
And then there’s the money.
Secret formula
A professional parenting pair in a Bridging Families home can earn around $100,000 a year, plus benefits, while living in a house owned or leased by a sponsoring organization. That is more than enough to lure some folks into full-time foster parent work.
Crossnore cobbled together the funds to pay parents by combining monies from Title IV-E, a part of the Social Security Act aimed at supporting foster children, and Medicaid, the federal health insurance plan for low-income residents.
The real key is that Crossnore raises private dollars to cover a lot of the overhead. Counties receive most of the same government funds for managing foster kids in their care, but bureaucratic costs siphon off the lion’s share. What’s left goes to the foster family as
their stipend.
With the overhead covered, Bridging Families is able to pay its parents five times more than volunteer foster parents receive.
Bridging Families “allows us to keep siblings together, especially larger groups,” says Lisa Cauley, division director for the N.C. Deparmtnet of Health and Human Services. Volunteer parents seldom accept more than two children at a time, and usually accept just one. “The best option is to place (kids) together. They’ve lost their home, their parents. They don’t need to lose (siblings), too. And then the children get to visit with their parents, and the parents learn skills through demonstrated change. The professional aspect means there’s a consistency to it as well, which is rare in this world.”
Parents in Bridging Families also come with no desire to adopt the children for whom they care. That’s a contrast to many volunteer foster parents who view the program as a test run for adoption. That can create problems when a court orders the children to be reunified with their birth parents.
“[Bridging Families] works so well for reunification, which is always our goal,” says Cauley. “We want the children back with their families.”
Eighty percent of the children placed in Bridging Families homes have been reunited with their parents. The state reunification rate is just less than 40% since 2018, according to Department of Health and Human Services statistics.
Franchise growth
Earlier this year Crossnore signed a two-year, $1.8 million contract with DHHS to expand the program across the state, with Bridging Families designated as the state model. The Leon Levine Foundation of Charlotte committed $3.75 million to
the project.
Twelve Bridging Families homes are in operation, with three more opening soon. A lot more may be on the way. Loftis is optimistic the number could reach “100, and fairly soon.”
Crossnore operates a few Bridging Families homes itself, having opened a Huntersville office a few years ago, with plans for a Charlotte site next year. It is creating “franchises,” homes run by other organizations who receive training and nurturing.
Loftis says finding partner agencies like Crossnore in the eastern half of the state is the most critical need for now.
“We are part of the community in the mountains and in the middle (the Piedmont),” he says. “But if I go to Fayetteville … I don’t know anybody there and they don’t know me. How is that going to work? The organization doing this needs to have some roots in
that area.”
Another major need are the actual homes themselves. Crossnore has been creative in uncovering housing opportunities, too. A developer who has renovated mountain homes to use as Airbnb’s is leasing two houses to Bridging Families. Discussions are underway with Wingate University about some former fraternity houses that might help Crossnore find a way to enter the pricey Charlotte market. It would give students in Wingate’s new Masters in Social Work program a convenient practicum site.
Crossnore has turned former employee residences at its Winston-Salem campus into Bridging Families homes. A Methodist church in Saluda in Polk County donated a home
to the program.
With more buy-in from the faith community, Loftis says he could solve the state’s foster care problems.
“There are more than 16,000 Christian churches in the state,” says Loftis. “There are only 12,000 kids in foster care (in North Carolina) today. So we could end it today if every church said, ‘we’ll have one home, ….one kid.’”
Loftis smiles, and he is joking, but not entirely. He has made a career of calling it like he sees regarding care of North Carolina’s most vulnerable children.
“He has a force of personality that is impressive,” says Patton McDowell, a Charlotte consultant. He has worked with both Loftis and his wife, Sally, an HR consultant for nonprofits. “For the most part, Brett (Loftis) is diplomatic, but he’s not afraid to call someone out. … When he was on my podcast recently, he joked that (his wife) Sally doesn’t like to bring him along to dinner parties because no one wants to hear all that homeless children stuff over dinner, and yet … he can’t help himself.”
Loftis admits he can be intense, but believes he has mellowed over the years. Still, making adults uncomfortable for a good cause doesn’t really bother him. They’re not his favorite
people anyway.
“To be honest, I’d rather spend time around children,” Loftis says. “They’re more honest.” ■
