Radford Cares: Consortium for Resource, Adoptive, and Foster Family Training

Twenty years ago, 48 of the 50 states in the U.S. had programs to provide basic parental training for families who were fostering or adopting children in the social services system. The Commonwealth of Virginia wasn’t among them.

While training wasn’t legally required for families at the time, most states realized that helping parents by providing basic parenting education could lead to improved outcomes for children by helping shape stronger foster, adoptive, respite and kinship families. This was especially true for those children with inherited substance abuse issues, behavioral problems and/or trauma.

In 2003, Virginia got on board, and the Consortium for Resource, Adoptive, and Foster Family Training (CRAFFT) initiative was born, founded as a joint project of the Virginia Department of Social Services (VDSS) and Radford University, Norfolk State University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

“The original idea was to leverage universities and colleges as a resource to help with training because higher education institutions had better government relations, in-kind funding and professional expertise,” recalls Susan Taylor, CRAFFT coordinator for the Piedmont region. “These universities were chosen to participate because each had a master’s level social work program, and that’s where they wanted to draw the knowledge from to train parents.”

The CRAFFT training is five to seven weeks, but the coordinators have autonomy to adjust the program length and curriculum as needed — like they did when portions of the program became virtual during COVID-19. They found that adult learners actually preferred the online method and have stuck with it.

Around 2008, Virginia made the training mandatory before a parent could foster or adopt a child.

Rhonda Roop, CRAFFT coordinator for the western region, says that the ability to mold the program to meet the needs of parents has been essential to its success.

And COVID, as bad as the pandemic was, gave VDSS and CRAFFT the chance to pause and look at what was working and what wasn’t.

“One of the things we’re doing now that we weren’t doing 20 years ago is working more with the birth parents in addition to the adoptive or foster parents,” Roop says. “It’s critical that foster parents support the relationship between the children and their birth parents. They’re required to, but we know it’s essential for the children’s development and growth.”

The CRAFFT program administered through Radford University is overseen by Diane Hodge, director of Radford’s School of Social Work and a professor in the program. Hodge has coordinated the program for a little over a decade and works closely with both Taylor and Roop. She helps manage the approximately $200,000 in federal passthrough dedicated to the grant each year.

Effective this year, the Families First Prevention Services Act delinks funds earmarked for foster care so they can support children’s needs without putting them in the foster care system. In other words, someone who takes in a child through kinship or respite would, for the first time, be eligible to get money to help care for that child.

In addition to adjusting to the training to work with new kinds of resource parents, the CRAFFT coordinators are also bracing for an increase in the number of foster children entering the system over the next five to 10 years.

Whatever the world throws at the CRAFFT coordinators and social workers across Virginia, it seems like this special group of people will make the best of it and evolve to meet the needs of countless children in times of crisis.

“What is the thing that will help kids be able to overcome and do better to get out of this generational cycle?” Hodge asked. “A lot of it is simply having someone – anyone – who cares. A teacher, a social worker, a parent – one little moment of caring can make a huge difference to a child in bad circumstances.”