By Jennifer Fernandez
When families are in crisis, foster parents often fill in to provide a safe place for children while parents get their lives together. Traditionally, foster parents were volunteers who received a small monthly stipend to care for these children.
But since the pandemic, the state has had a dearth of these volunteer foster parents. That’s part of the reason that, since 2023, North Carolina has been exploring “professional foster parents” as one way to improve the child welfare system.
The state initially funded a pilot program through Avery County-based Crossnore Communities for Children. The program, Bridging Families, offers siblings who are entering foster care a chance to stay together and pairs them with “professional parents” who work toward reuniting the children with their families — either parents or members of the children’s extended family.
A $1.8 million contract with the state Department of Health and Human Services, announced in late 2024, allowed Crossnore to expand the program. In addition, a $3.75 million grant from The Leon Levine Foundation established the Bridging Families Institute, which will help other areas of the state replicate the program.
In April, the North Carolina Medical Journal published a commentary by Crossnore President Brett Loftis and CEO Sarah Norris about professional foster parenting and its role in reforming the child welfare system. The two recently sat down with NC Health News to discuss the issue.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
NCHN: What is a professional foster parent?
Norris: In the standard traditional foster care system, all folks who are foster parents are volunteers. They go through training, and then they’re connected with staff to have some oversight. But at the end of the day, they’re not employees, so they can’t be held accountable like employees, and they don’t get benefits like employees. A lot of them work outside of the home.
Professional foster parenting is everything different than what I just said. From a structure standpoint, it is a position that they hold with our agency, so they get benefits and a salary. We also put them not only through the traditional foster care training, but they get enhanced training with us for trauma-informed care response, as well as some other parenting techniques to be able to use within the program.
We were able to hold them accountable, like staff, in the sense of providing intensive supervision and support.
NCHN: You said the structure around professional foster parent staff is different. Could you expand on that?
Norris: With that traditional system, foster parents, when they get through the training, they’re living in their own home, and they’re called at any given time when a child is available for placement. And then they’re making that decision of whether it’s the right time for them and their family.
With our program, [the parents] are placed in one of our homes, so we are able to provide them a way to get set up and be ready for those placements prior to being able to have kids placed there. They are surrounded with a team, so they have a supervisor, they have a therapist who works directly with them and the children and the birth families, and they have a case manager. They have additional folks that are in their home at all times, kind of in and out more than the traditional system.
They also are set up to be co-coaches to the birth parents. Rather than an adversarial sort of relationship, they’re set up to be able to be on their side and help support the birth parents, which just changes everything, specifically for the child to feel like everyone’s on the same page, and then for the birth parents to feel comfortable working with them, to not feel ashamed of what’s happened, and to be able to work through those things. That sort of setup just allows for an organic, familial type of connection that we have found to be very successful in moving things forward much more quickly.
NCHN: How many professional foster parents are there in North Carolina?
Norris: Our program is the only one that has professional foster parents approved by the state. We have probably 40 right now. It’s a very small number overall.
More than 10,000 children are in North Carolina’s foster care system, and the Children’s Home Society says that in 2025, there were about 5,500 foster homes in the state. About another thousand older children (18-20 years old) are in extended foster care, according to Gov. Josh Stein’s proclamation making May Foster Care Month.
NCHN: How has the Bridging Families Institute helped to train professional foster parents in the state?
Norris: The institute is still in what I would call infancy stages of an implementation program. The institute is still building curriculum. It’s still working on some of the evidence-based program work, some of the research, and kind of the whole business model to work with additional agencies to be able to expand. We’re still in a space of needing to adjust things and see where we need to go.
Loftis: The Bridging Families Institute has staff and a managing director, Dr. Dawn O’Malley, who is longtime in child welfare and children’s mental health in North Carolina. They’re ready to go. We’ve received inquiries from six or eight different states already, who are interested, and so we anticipate once we open the floodgates, they will come quickly. So we’re just trying to be prepared for that, and our first priority is really helping to reorder the system in North Carolina.
NCHN: What are the benefits or advantages of professional foster parenting versus traditional foster parenting?
Norris: Two things stand out.
One is the intentionality around the structure of the program, the way we set it up. And the relationship between the Bridge parents and the birth parents automatically puts that program ahead of the traditional [foster parenting] for those [birth] parents to be able to be successful. They will often do team family meetings.
The birth parents are right there beside the Bridge parent as a part of the team versus the person being served in the way that feels like they’re “less than.” That is huge. The other piece [is] siblings being able to stay together. We have had sibling sets of six that have been able to all go home together.
Loftis: This is about that parent being successful as a parent. The traditional volunteer system is “Well, if that parent is successful, great, but if they [aren’t], I may be able to adopt these children.”
There’s this broken incentive from the very beginning.
NCHN: What makes a good professional foster parent?
Norris: What we are finding is that a lot of these folks that have come with us and are still with us, they find it to be a calling of some sort. It’s part of their purpose. They love parenting. There’s no one stereotypical type of person who can do this.
They have to want to be able to be there, and they have to know going in that they’re not going to be adopting these kids. They’re coming in kind of with an openness, with the desire to give back, with a desire to be helpful. If they’ve raised kids in the past, obviously that can definitely be helpful.
Loftis: They really believe that a child’s best place is with their biological family. In the current system, there’s a lot of, kind of vilification of parents: “Those are bad people who did bad things, and we’re going to protect these children from those bad people who did bad things.”
I’m not saying that that doesn’t exist, but the majority of families in the system are there with a complicated mix of poverty, their own trauma history, their own addiction and mental health issues that need support in order to parent, and the best Bridge parents are the ones that really see their role is to help make that parent be successful.
NCHN: How has foster parenting changed over the years?
Loftis: My grandmother was a foster parent, so she raised her five children, and after the last one was grown, she said, ‘I have all these bedrooms, why would I not be a foster parent?’ There are not a lot of people who are retiring and saying, ‘You know, what I’d like to do, I’d like to fill all these empty bedrooms with children with a lot of needs.’
People are having fewer children themselves, so you know they may have two kids and they’ll have room for one child in foster care, where most kids in foster care are there with their sibling and need to be kept together.
Some of it is also just basic economics. Used to be, have one parent that was a teacher and one parent stayed home and they were able to afford a house, that’s just not true anymore. Both parents are working. They’re taking kids back and forth to activities. They just don’t have room in their life for three or four more children who may have some significant needs.
Norris: The complexity of what kids need has changed. (And in recent years, social media and social isolation from the COVID-19 pandemic have affected mental health among young people.) By the time they do end up in care, they’ve got more complex trauma that is more intense.
Within the first year, half of people who’ve signed up to traditional foster care are done, and within a five-year period, you’re looking at about 90 percent of people are not fostering. They’re just not doing it for as long. A big piece of it is how much can they handle? And they feel like they can’t do what they need to to take care of those kids.
NCHN: How has professional foster parenting changed reunification rates?
Norris: The [federal] standard is 45 percent. That’s what we’re required to do. North Carolina is at 30 percent that we’re seeing kids reunify within a year.
[Bridge parents are] more in the 70s — 75 percent or so. And it’s happening much sooner — nine months.
NCHN: What happens to the kids in your program who don’t reunify? Do they lose that opportunity to be adopted since professional foster parents aren’t supposed to adopt?
Loftis: We have an adoption program. We have workers out there that are recruiting homes, permanent homes, and so if we did have one of our young people in Bridging Families that, for whatever reason, the parent was not able to be a reunification, we would then go to family members.
If there was no possible reunification [with family members], then we would start partnering the Bridge parents with a potential adoptive parent.
NCHN: Is there still a place for a non-professional foster parent?
Norris: Yes, there’s absolutely room, but what we want to be able to do is kind of flip the scale of how many professionals we have versus non-professionals. And then those that are non-professionals, it really is targeted versus just trying to fill this void of we just need more and more and more of the same [thing] that’s just not worked for years.
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