Julia is a 39-year veteran in child welfare with extensive local and state-level experience, including direct practice, supervision, leadership, and state-level consultation and technical assistance within North Carolina. Julia has a unique lens in that she has practiced child welfare in every service area, including: Investigative Assessments, Family In Home, Permanency Planning, Foster Home Licensing, and Neutral Facilitation. For eleven years, she was a Social Work Supervisor in Buncombe County, then upon retirement, accepted a Child Welfare Regional Consultant role with the NC Department of Health & Human Services, specializing in safety. The combination of Julia’s educational background and a Bachelor of Social Work degree from Methodist University supports her extensive experience in the profession.
Julia has subject matter expertise in policy application to practice, coaching workers, supervisors, and managers, and implementing continuous quality improvement processes to achieve quality in service delivery. In her consultant capacity, she has provided technical assistance and training to counties on various topics, participated in intensive child fatality reviews, revised and clarified policy, and assisted counties in applying policy. She partnered with counties to complete program improvement plan requirements and has intensively consulted, in roles including supervisor roles, in two counties divested administrative authority under NCGS 108A-74. Julia partnered with those two counties to address systemic issues related to safety, permanency, and well-being and to help them achieve their corrective action goals to successfully finalize their plan to resume authority.
Julia’s primary focus is to deliver a “hands-on” capacity-building experience to train (and retrain) and coach the workforce to usher in a new generation of highly skilled child welfare social workers who can help shift the system to achieve more substantial outcomes for children, families, and the community.
