As children and families exit foster care, what helps to ensure their future success? The child welfare team from Catawba County Social Services (CCSS) has focused on this question since 2007 with a goal of improving permanency outcomes such as reunification, guardianship, legal custody or adoption in North Carolina. Eighteen years later, the Success Coach program has emerged as a promising answer.
Success Coaches meet children and families as they exit foster care to identify needs, set goals and develop success plans aimed at keeping them together for the long run, explained CCSS Success Coach Supervisor Sarah Bolick. Services can include clinical components, skill-building, crisis prevention and intervention, case management, advocacy, and connections to community resources.
“A lot of families tell us they couldn’t imagine where they’d be if they didn’t have their Success Coach to walk through their journeys together,” Bolick remarked. “Success Coaches provide an intervention when families have needs but also offer preventive services to help keep crises from coming.”
The Success Coach model, developed through a longstanding partnership between The Duke Endowment and CCSS, has demonstrated positive results since its launch in 2005 – 2006, helping ensure permanency with each adoption, reunification, guardianship or custody arrangement. Notably, for the last decade in Catawba County, no children have re-entered foster care within 12 months after exiting the system.
CCSS was also able to replicate the program in five additional agencies in North and South Carolina as well as California, building Success Coach’s case as a replicable model. Thanks to such momentum, the program launched statewide in April 2025, when the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services announced a $16.5 million investment to expand Success Coach in all 100 counties. Over the next three years, local social services departments will receive training on program implementation, ensuring fidelity to the model, and increasing access to the service across the state.
Learning along the way
With such remarkable success, what sets this model apart? Chrissy Triplett, child welfare program manager at CCSS, stressed that unlike many programs in the child welfare system, Success Coach is voluntary for families. This is key to forming relationships built within each family’s home and honoring and supporting goals that they identify as important.
“It’s not about pushing our agenda,” Tripplett explained. “Being a Success Coach is about coming alongside families, hearing them, and saying, ‘This was a tough road, but you made it through. Your journey is just starting. What can we do to help?’”
Triplett points to another key learning: longevity matters. Providing families with services for up to two years is crucial to developing trust. “A lot of other services are very time limited. Often, it’s really not until that six-month point that families let their guard down and start to trust and share about challenges they have. Without this time, we would never be able to help them get to the core issues,” she said.
Implementation Science
Perhaps the biggest difference-maker in the expansion and statewide adoption of Success Coach has been building the program the right way from the ground up.
Since 2007, the Endowment has invested $12.5 million to help Catawba County Department of Social Service leadership and staff use implementation science principles to research, develop, deploy and test all the elements needed to successfully implement – and replicate – Success Coach. Implementation Science studies how best to support the successful adoption of proven or promising programs. It addresses gaps between what research shows can be successful and how that knowledge is applied in real-world settings.
Triplett was quick to note the role of implementation science in the success and expansion of Success Coach. “Implementation science has been a blessing for our agency,” she reflected. “We’ve learned so much through building the program — about coaching workers, tracking data and making data-informed decisions. It’s changed the way that we practice as an agency.”
Sarah Bolick agreed. She hopes that Success Coach’s expansion and replication will continue both into the future and into new communities. “Every family has room to grow or areas to strengthen. I would love to see that no matter where in the United States you live, you can have a Success Coach. Families need this — not just in North Carolina, but everywhere.”
The Endowment, Division of Social Services and other partners are planning a rigorous evaluation of the program. The evaluation aims to build evidence for the effectiveness of the model and ensure the program achieves its intended outcomes as it’s scaled across the state.
