An unusual Virginia Tech embedded team in Fairfax County, Va., makes lives better for children, especially for children in foster care and at-risk youth and their families. The team works collaboratively with county partners, bringing in more than $4 million a year to county coffers. Equally important, the team secures needed benefits for children.
The seven-member Virginia Tech team pursues funding from five federal funding streams – painstaking and specialized work that frees Fairfax County's social workers to concentrate on the children, not the paperwork.
"We create financial stability for the children, and in many cases the funds we've identified stay with the child after family reunification when the child goes home," says Melony Price-Rhodes, senior program director at the Institute for Policy and Governance and the team’s principal investigator. "There's a lot of money out there that can be gleaned."
Read more about the Fairfax Team and their foster care efforts in the Washington Post.