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.