JCCA Overview

JCCA’s Child Welfare City Division stabilizes and strengthens nearly 4,000 families each year across New York City, who are facing crisis such as mental illness, family violence, substance abuse and other stressor. These families often struggle to provide consistent, safe care for their children. The Division also works with hundreds of other children who cannot remain safely in their homes, placing them with foster families across the City’s diverse communities, including ORR migrant children. In addition, the Division works to strengthen birth families, supporting foster families to provide comprehensive care and leverage additional services and support to help children and youth thrive.

Job Summary:

The Vice President of Foster Home, Prevention Services and ORR Programs is responsible for all aspects of day-to-day oversight, program planning, project management, budgeting, staffing and operations for the Foster Care and Prevention Division at JCCA. Using data-driven strategies and change-management approaches, the VP ensures that high quality, comprehensive, and effective services are delivered to families, young people and children across all departments.

The VP integrates continuous quality improvement through data, fosters innovation to address challenges, and ensures that the voices of youth and families are central in program planning and service delivery. This role also focuses on preventing system involvement for at-risk families and achieving swift, safe, and stable permanency for children in care. Additionally, the VP addresses service gaps, implements improvement initiatives, and ensures that all systems support high-quality child welfare practices that promote the safety and well-being of children and families. Working alongside legal staff, the VP ensures compliance with family court practices and guides decisions based on child safety, well-being, and permanency.

As a key ambassador for the Division, the VP represents JCCA in multiple coalitions throughout the City and State, cultivates partnerships and alliances, and serves as a primary liaison with oversight entities, all while prioritizing the needs of the children, youth, and families served.

Summary of Responsibilities:

Strategic Vision and Leadership

• Elevate and animate JCCA’s overarching mission and strategic plan; Articulate a vision for FHS and Prevention and establish a clear operational plan of action to achieve agency and divisional goals and objectives; Elevate and animate JCCA’s mission and strategic plan; articulate a vision for Foster Home and Prevention Services and establish a clear operational plan to achieve divisional and agency goals.

• As a member of the Executive Team, work collaboratively with other team members and across divisions to solve challenges, share feedback, and promote innovation.

• Model professionalism, accountability, and teamwork across the Division.

• Promote excellence in child welfare practice at all levels; Champion best practices adopted by ACS, OCFS and lead efforts to ensure that JCCA remains at the cutting edge of new research and practice models;

• Promote and model dependable, responsible, consummately professional and accountable practices, communication and behavior as well as positive program norms and teamwork among staff across the Division;

• Serve as a key JCCA ambassador and representative at public functions, events, forums and through partnerships, at development meetings with governmental oversight entities, with city agencies, the non-profit community and with government and private funders;

• Work to define issues, extract and validate information to pro-actively develop “solutions” when alternatives, information and objectives are ambiguous; Think and plan strategically regarding time and resource priorities;

Management and Administration

• Oversee day-to-day operations, ensuring alignment with JCCA’s mission, goals, and objectives.

• Plan, coordinate and lead agency-wide efforts to ensure JCCA responds appropriately and comprehensively to statutory, regulatory, service model and service delivery changes across the system;

• Ensure outcome-focused, culturally-responsive services exceed expectations set by ACS, OCFS, and other oversight bodies.

• Ensure that services delivered to children, young people and families are outcome-focused, measurable, sustainable and culturally-responsive according to and, when possible, exceeding NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and NYS Office of Children & Family Services (OCFS) standards and expectations;

• Working closely with Program Quality and together with agency leadership, champion the development, design and implementation of daily dashboards and other tools to ensure that, on a daily basis, Division staff access and assess their individual and team progress towards best practices and compliance with contractual standards and goals;

Division Fiscal Oversight

• Embrace, coordinate and lead all aspects of the Division’s successful transition to Medicaid Managed Care including reshaping and realigning the workflows and workforce to provide comprehensive services while maximizing encounter-based revenue; this will require a new focus on timely documentation for successful billing;

• Explore with the CPO ways to integrate encounter-based billing services; and/or develop of continuum of care for youth and families within JCCA’s services. Have a strong understanding of levels of care, and how to integrate behavioral health into a child welfare system.

• Coordinate closely with Compliance, Fiscal and Administrative leadership to ensure program operations and systems, including the consistent use of the agency’s EHR -- are fully integrated with billing and reporting requirements and standards; Ensure that program and system improvements or changes are consistent with EHR and meet all other regulatory documentation standards and needs;

Staff Development and Supervision

• Hire, cultivate and manage highly competent and dedicated staff across the Division, fostering a culture of accountability

• Provide regular supervision to key staff members, including constructive and solution-focused supervision to direct reports including but not limited to the Assistant Vice President (AVP) of Foster Home Services; AVP of Preventive Services; and The Director of Home Finding/ORR.

• Promote data-driven supervision and performance evaluation across the Division.

• Ensure that monthly meetings focus on improving practices, data fluency, and compliance to enhance child and family outcomes.

• Require a high level of accountability among all Division staff; Infuse and embrace data driven techniques and expectations into all aspects of supervision, performance evaluation and oversight;

Strategic Outreach and Partnerships

• Serve as the primary liaison for Foster Home Services and Prevention with ACS, OCFS, ORR and other key stakeholders.

• Represent JCCA at citywide industry meetings, consortiums, coalitions, advisory and working groups;

• Cultivate strong, dynamic relationships with oversight ensuring consistent collaboration and representation at city and state meetings and workgroups.

Qualifications:

• Masters or above in Social Work, Public Administration, Psychology, Law or another related field required;
• 15+ years of successful experience in data-driven management in child welfare, juvenile justice and/or related fields, and experience in program evaluation and improvement;
• Extensive successful experience in program management, day-to-day operations and management-level staff supervision;
• Successful track record of translating, integrating and improving statistical fluency and competency for all levels of staff;
• Successful experience in establishing and maintaining strong, intra/interdivisional collateral collaborations;
• Experience managing budget with multi-source revenue with time and effort requirements required;
• Experience and technical proficiency with Electronic Health Records, specifically Smartcare strongly desired;
• Experience managing culture change in a workplace, i.e., substantial change in workflow processes (e.g., Managed Care transition) strongly desired;
• An understanding of the impacts of institutional and structural racism on the child welfare system and in disadvantaged communities
• Knowledge of Medicaid and Medicaid Managed Care strongly desired;
• Experience in child welfare and juvenile justice strongly desired;
• Extensive knowledge of Connections (CNNX), Promis, ARTS, and other New York City and State child welfare data systems strongly desired;