Ryan Worden, a North Carolina parent, reunified with his young daughter in 2024 after a long journey through the child welfare system that included homelessness, incarceration, and substance use disorder treatment. It was a new beginning for his family, but challenges remained. While he had support from close relatives, Worden remained on court-ordered supervised probation and did not have his driver’s license, making it difficult for him to pick up his child from school, transport her to activities, and take her to medical visits and other appointments.

He enrolled in Success Coach, a voluntary, no-cost program that works to enhance the well-being of children and families that achieved permanency via reunification, adoption, guardianship, or legal custody. Worden was paired with a coach who tailored her support to his family’s needs, such as providing transportation when Worden’s father and brother could not. The challenges Worden faced immediately after reunification “really could have been a problem without Success Coach,” he says. Worden now has his driver’s license and a stable job, and the family is thriving.

The post-permanency support Worden and his daughter received is not typical. Once a child exits foster care to permanency, the bulk of family services end. Most states offer support for families who adopt a child from foster care, but the extent and type of support — counseling, financial subsidies, emergency respite care — varies widely. Support for families that have reunified, however, is nearly nonexistent, and no programs exist to prevent crises or intervene when necessary to prevent children from re-entering the child welfare system.¹

Success Coach was designed to fill this gap. Voluntary and family-focused, the program has demonstrated positive outcomes and earns enthusiastic reviews from reunified and adoptive families that have participated. Originating in one North Carolina county, it is now being rolled out to all 100 counties in the state.²

A local response that became a statewide model

In the mid-2000s, leaders of the Department of Social Services in Catawba County (population of about 150,000 at the time) and The Duke Endowment, a North Carolina philanthropy, found they shared a similar frustration: the child welfare system measured safety and permanency, but had little sense of what happened after cases closed. “We counted exits as success,” says Phil Redmond, special advisor to the president at the Endowment, “but we weren’t sure the experience in child welfare was actually leading to improved outcomes.”

Informal conversations led to formal collaboration. Catawba County convened a broad range of stakeholders — including child welfare professionals and families with lived experience — to find out what families needed after foster care and how to better support their long-term stability. Families expressed that they wanted support but not services that felt clinical, punitive, or surveillance-based.

After piloting and evaluating various approaches, Success Coach emerged as the one that families valued most and showed the most promise. Rooted in the belief that families are resilient and can recover from stress and crisis, especially when provided with the right support, the post-permanency model was designed to respond to families’ real-world needs rather than forcing families to fit a rigid service structure. Success Coach was made possible in part by Catawba County’s practice of allowing departments to reinvest budget surpluses in innovative programming, and in part by the county’s partnership with The Duke Endowment. From day one, the Endowment invested not only in the program but in the infrastructure to sustain it. Having watched promising programs fade when grant dollars ended, the philanthropy invited researchers in implementation science to help build the model, focusing on workforce development, quality assurance, and data use.

The program began serving adoptive and reunified Catawba County families in 2010, then expanded to five neighboring counties in 2015 to reach more families, including guardianship families, and to serve enough families so that more rigorous research could be conducted. In April 2025, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services invested $16.5 million to spread Success Coach throughout the entire state.

Key elements of Success Coach

Voluntary, time-limited support

Participation in Success Coach is voluntary, which is fundamental to the model. Families are referred once permanency is achieved, ideally immediately upon transfer of custody to the family, but they can enter the program at any time. “They might not want services at first,” said Leaann Setliff, a program participant, “but if people get to a point when they’re drowning then they’re like, ‘I’ve got to have something.’”

Aliza Blumstein, social work director for Boys and Girls Homes of North Carolina, a Success Coach provider, said adoptive families tend to reach out later, sometimes during crises. The important thing for families to know is that the door to Success Coach remains open. Services can last up to two years and be restarted if needed. Coaches work with families to develop a success plan and meet with them on the family’s terms, typically at least twice a month in order to build trust over time. “Often, it’s really not until that six-month point that families let their guard down and start to trust and share their challenges,” said Chrissy Triplett, child welfare program manager in Catawba County. “Without this time, we would never be able to get to the core issues.”

Trusted relationships

Another fundamental aspect of the program is the trusted relationship between coaches and families. From the first interaction, coaches signal to a family that they are there to help, not to judge. “Success Coach focuses on the whole family,” said Kenin Anzalone, a Success Coach participant. “It’s about keeping your family together.”

Coaches try to make clear that they respect the family’s autonomy and focus on building their strengths. “We’re not going to lecture you, we’re not going to judge you,” said Sarah Bolick, Success Coach supervisor. “We’re going to come in and do life with you for a little bit and help you to be the best that your family can be.”

Coaches often make initial contact by phone and meet families where they prefer. Visits are family-led: coaches greet everyone in the household and let the family guide the conversation. “We’re not rolling up in county cars with a badge on,” said Liz Smith, a coach in Catawba County. “We’re breaking bread, going to a ball game, rooting kids on.”

Individualized, non-clinical coaching

Coaches work with families to set individualized goals. Parents tend to drive the goals for families with younger children, while families with older children also directly involve the youth. The goals span six domains of family well-being: mental and emotional health; family functioning; caregiver self-sufficiency; children’s education; family environment; and social and community support. Within each domain, coaches help families build practical skills — such as household budgeting, financial planning, and employability — based on what each family identifies as most important.

Carrie Czikk, a Success Coach participant, describes how her daughter was “bouncing off the walls” when their family’s coach arrived for the first time. Rather than start with the paperwork of a formal intake, the coach asked the family what they needed, then sat down and played a board game with the child until she felt comfortable. Over the following two years, that same responsive approach prevailed, Czikk said. “She really noted what our needs were at every single meeting we had. At the next meeting, she would bring something that was specific to our needs at that time.”

Success Coach draws on two evidence-based frameworks, Trust-Based Relational Intervention and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, without feeling clinical in practice. Engagement is creative, often revolving around the playing of games, which helps lower defenses and lets coaches and families learn about one another. Shared meals and flexible scheduling also are key.

Flexible, wide-ranging support

Once the relationship is established and goals are set, coaches have broad flexibility — for example, helping parents navigate public systems, helping parents advocate for children at school, connecting families to community resources, and providing concrete material support, such as help with home repairs, food, transportation, or emergency needs. Common resource challenges for families participating in the program include housing, food security, employment, and household budgeting, while behavioral challenges may include mental health, coping with grief and loss, and helping adopted children navigate identity formation.

Coaches can also provide support during crises. Anzalone, who has a 4-year-old daughter with severe ADHD and behavioral issues, reached a breaking point one evening and called her coach around 9:30 p.m. “I didn’t want (the child protection agency) involved again but I didn’t know what to do with her,” Anzalone said. Her coach came to the house and stayed until nearly midnight, calming child and mother both. She then connected the family to a parent-child behavior therapy service.

Coaches can also help navigate a complex social services system. Setliff needed a specialized therapist for her daughter but “if I had just called the office and said, ‘We want to get counseling,’ the office probably would have said, ‘She’s not taking new clients.’” But her coach had a relationship with that therapist, and was able to get an appointment for Setliff’s daughter. “That was really a big piece of Success Coach — being able to get resources that I might not have been able to access on my own.”

Sustained engagement is another key ingredient in the model. Coach Annette Arroyo recalls meeting a single mother who had just reunified with her teenage son after he had spent over five years in foster care. The family had no car, faced eviction, and the teen was failing every class. Over two years, Arroyo connected the mom to employment support and food resources, and the youth to an adventure camp that helped the teen re-engage socially and academically. Even after services ended, the mother stayed in touch with Arroyo to share updates and celebrations, such as her son’s graduation from high school and enrollment in college. The mother has earned an associate’s degree and now works as a Certified Peer Support Specialist, helping other families in need of support.

What research shows — and what it does not

The evidence base for Success Coach demonstrates promise but is not yet conclusive. County data shows that during the first 10 years of the program, no children re-entered the child welfare system within 12 months after their families participated in Success Coach.³ This is significant given that the national rate of re-entry into foster care is 5.6%, and the rate in many states is even higher.⁴

A 2013 Catawba County evaluation⁵ and a 2021 Child Trends outcome study⁶ found Success Coach appeared to decrease risk of re-allegations and re-entries, but a causal association could not be made due to limited enrollment, which led to a small sample size. Families that engaged with Success Coach were consistently positive about the service and reported strong, meaningful relationships with their coaches. The open question is less about whether the program helps and more about which specific elements drive outcomes. “It’s hard to isolate the active ingredients,” says Karin Malm, senior research scholar at Child Trends, who studied the program.

A 2019 Child Trends report found that no other post-permanency services available to families in the counties studied were as comprehensive as Success Coach.⁷ Berenice Rushovich, a senior scientist at Child Trends, points to the program’s well-developed manual, robust training infrastructure, and strong quality assurance. In another vote of confidence, the Centro de intercambio de información basada en la evidencia de California recognized the program as part of its “post-permanency supports” category in 2023, though it did not provide a rating.

Another important question remains as to how the program can be more effective in reaching those families that can benefit most from the service. The families most distanced from the child welfare system may be the hardest to engage — and yet most in need. “We have learned from other post-adoption studies that families can be given information at the time of adoption, but that’s not really when they need it,” Rushovich says.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services’ commitment of $16.5 million in three-year vendor contracts represents perhaps the most concrete external vote of confidence for the program. The statewide rollout, underway across all 100 North Carolina counties, is currently being evaluated, but has not yet produced data.

Considerations for implementation

Leadership at county and state agencies, along with local providers, offered their perspectives on how to successfully implement Success Coach in other jurisdictions:

A single infrastructure

Success Coach underwent nearly two decades of iteration, evaluation, and refinement in North Carolina before it went to scale across the state under a uniform model. “When you have a uniform model, you can easily see from that eagle-eye view,” says Janet Kearns, post permanency director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. “Is this working? Where is it working? Where and why is it not working?” That kind of system-level accountability is not possible with a patchwork of local model variations, she adds.

Consistency in leadership and dedicated stewardship

In North Carolina, Catawba County has served as lead agency and model steward from the beginning. Despite multiple county leadership changes, Success Coach program leaders have largely remained the same, maintaining continuity and institutional knowledge. Today, the county is both a vendor providing direct services and the statewide lead responsible for training, technical assistance, and fidelity.

The right coaches

Coaches typically work with 10 to 15 families at a time, their caseloads based on geography and the complexity of family challenges. They are hired based on their critical thinking skills, trauma-informed orientation, life experience, and relational skills. Coaches, their supervisors, and the child protection agency itself must genuinely believe in the value that parents have the capacity to succeed and deserve support to do so.

Strong supervision and experience

Experienced supervisors with frontline experience also are critical to the program. Culture is set from the top, and the model is feedback-driven. Child Trends found that more seasoned coaches were better than inexperienced coaches at connecting with families and tailoring their approach, a reminder that retention practices matter as much as careful hiring.

Rollout planning

Rolling out the program to all 100 counties in North Carolina required detailed planning that continued well past launch. “I think the key was the communication,” says Mary Mackins, private agency licensing manager at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Leaders learned from their mistakes: early replication sites sometimes received training before they were ready, with family engagement plans not yet in place and referral pipelines underdeveloped. In response, Catawba County created readiness assessments and training prerequisites to ensure sites were prepared to move forward. Implementing a staggered roll-out across the state also allows for a more rigorous evaluation of the program, by creating treatment and comparison regions.

Geography and resource availability

The model depends in part on connecting families to community resources, but in many rural counties those resources are few or nonexistent. Blumstein of Boys and Girls Homes of North Carolina emphasizes that understanding what resources exist and building relationships with local providers are critical implementation steps before launch, not something to figure out after coaches already are in the field. “We don’t just go in there and say we’re going to do it all,” she said. “We’re constantly partnering with other agencies to make sure families are having their needs met.” Geography also affects workload: serving 15 families spread across a rural county is a very different assignment than serving 15 families within a city, and caseloads should reflect this difference from the start.

Organizational identity and trust

Organizational identity matters as well. Administrators and staff observe that reunified families may trust private nonprofit organizations more than public agencies, which they associate with child removal. Yet some families still may see contracted private providers as foster care organizations and therefore mistrust them as well. Catawba County has worked — and continues to work — to position Success Coach as a program independent from the child protection agency.

De cara al futuro

Child Trends currently is conducting a three-year evaluation of Success Coach’s expansion across North Carolina’s 100 counties. The study centers on implementation fidelity — specifically, whether two newer providers are delivering the model as Catawba County designed it. Evaluators also will track the mix of reunification, adoption, and guardianship families that are participating. In addition, the study will explore how the provider agencies find and engage with families that have been out of the child welfare system for years but still need support.

The need for post-permanency support is not unique to North Carolinians. Families across the U.S. face a lack of services after legal permanency is achieved. As evidence of promise continues to mount, Success Coach provides a model for post-permanency services that additional jurisdictions can follow or adapt.

For families that complete the program, the impact can be profound. “I’ve gotten better with asking for help,” says Loren Moose, a Success Coach participant. “Just to know that there are people out there that will help and are willing, and that it is OK to ask for help.”