Senior Family Services Specialist - Child Welfare (Chesterfield-Colonial Heights)

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We know you!  You’re flexible, adaptable, and well-organized; compassionate and understanding; assertive and able to make independent decisions.  You’re committed to the children who need a voice and dedicated to their safety.  And you know what?  You might be exactly who we’re looking for.  

Customer Experience: It's Our Business, It's Our Passion.
The Chesterfield-Colonial Heights Department of Social Services is hiring Senior Family Services Specialists – for the CPS Investigations, CPS In-Home, Family Preservation, and Permanency Services teams.  Our priority is working with families to get them on track for a better life.  We serve as a community resource, while protecting and assisting our community’s most vulnerable members by providing solutions to break the chain of poverty/abuse/addiction and strive to change the trajectory of a child’s life.  Our Senior Family Services Specialists do a lot of things for a lot of people.  We offer many ways to use your degree and advance your career, along with great benefits.   Find your fit within our team!

What You Do and How You Do it:

In Child Welfare, you engage and empower families to make positive changes through assessing their needs, developing services plans, making referrals to community partners, and providing case management services.  You will learn local, state, and federal regulations, and stay up to date as things change.  You will maintain positive relationships while taking a trauma-informed, child and family-centered approach in service delivery.  You will provide after-hours CPS on-call coverage or Permanency on-call coverage on a rotating schedule.  At times, as the need arises, Senior Family Services Specialist staff are assigned to various teams within the child welfare continuum of services (foster care, adoption, family preservation, CPS).  You will make home visits to assess the safety of children and the risk of abuse.  You may have other assignments in other areas based on the needs of the agency. Perform other work as assigned.
 

Role Preview:  

• The CPS Investigations team responds to referrals alleging child abuse/neglect to families experiencing abuse/neglect in Chesterfield County and Colonial Heights.   Strong investigative, documentation, and assessment skills work best for this role.

• The Family Preservation Team works with children and their families through Chesterfield and Colonial Heights Juvenile Court for Child in Need of Services (CHINS) petitions, significant delinquency matters, custody petitions and relief of custody petitions. On this team, you will provide case management to these families by helping to connect them to resources within the community to help stabilize the home. In this role, you will work closely with multiple community partners such as the court system, guardian Ad litems, probation officers and mental health workers. At times, this position could assist with taking CPS referrals for abuse and/or neglect.  Strong assessment, case management and collaboration skills work best for this role.

• The CPS In-Home team works directly with identified families to provide case management and resources for case types that are transferred from CPS Investigations for continued monitoring for families experiencing abuse/neglect, provision of prevention services, and respond to referrals alleging child abuse/neglect in Chesterfield County and City of Colonial Heights.  Strong case management and collaboration skills work best for this role.

• The Permanency Services team supports and assists children who are in the legal custody of the department and their relative caregivers in permanency planning, utilizing available resources to meet their personal, social, health, and economic needs to help the