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Our Services / Child & Family Well-being / Child Welfare

Child Welfare

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Supporting Families, Keeping Children Safe

Wellpoint Care Network has partnered with the Department of Children and Families’ Division of Milwaukee Child Protective Services since 2009 to ensure children are safe and families are healthy in Milwaukee County. Families who come into care with the child protective system often have faced multiple adversities, including poverty, discrimination, poor mental health, substance use disorder and violence. Wellpoint Care partners with families and other community organizations to create a framework for healing that promotes stability and uses a trauma-informed perspective. 

Case Management

Wellpoint Care provides child welfare case management services to approximately 900 families, including nearly 1,300 children annually. We work diligently to provide services that ensure children are safe, as well as that families are stable and experience well-being. 

The majority of children in our care are placed with kinship or foster families while our case managers work with their families to achieve stability by reducing or mitigating the safety factors that brought the family into care. The focus of case management in these instances is to help families achieve safety, stability and reunification. While the majority of children and families are reunified, in cases where it’s not safe to do so, Wellpoint Care works to find permanent homes for children. 

In some cases, families are able to remain unified while accessing intensive in-home safety planning services. The focus of Intensive In-Home Case Management is to keep families safe, together and home.

Family Preservation Program

Wellpoint Care’s family preservation program aims to promote well-being, strengthen family relationships and keep families together safely. Participation can help families reunify more smoothly or prevent family separations through parent skill development and education. Services include:

  • Shared parenting support using the Fostering Relationships model
  • Supervised parent/child interactions
  • Specialized in-home family interaction sessions
  • Trauma Informed Care interventions
  • Problem solving and conflict resolution
  • Transition planning
  • Family advocacy and reunification planning

Additional services may include:

  • Mentoring, support and development of parenting and home management skills
  • Coaching family interactions/short-term therapeutic visitation supervision before reunification
  • Prevention and stabilization of crises
  • School advocacy
  • Linking families to ongoing community supports

Caregiver Support Services

Woman embracing child

Caregiver Support Services is a voluntary program that provides licensed foster parents and relative caregivers of children in court-ordered care with a variety of services to enhance their ability to meet the children’s needs.

The primary goals of the program are to increase placement stability and to help ensure that caregivers, who are an imperative part of the team, feel supported. This clinical service is caregiver-driven and delivered through regular, face-to-face contact in the caregiver’s home.

Program goals include:

  • Provide caregivers with individualized parent training, support and coaching with a trauma-sensitive approach
  • Engage with caregivers in an empathetic and emotionally-regulated manner
  • Guide and supports caregivers’ advocacy for the educational, medical and therapeutic needs of the children in their care
  • Enhance caregivers’ ability to navigate programs and systems and become connected to community resources
  • Encourage caregivers to increase their communication and interaction with the birth family and understand their caregiver role
  • Provide the care team with assistance in the efforts to achieve permanence

Community Connections

The Community Connections team provides Wellpoint Care families with community resources that lead to strong, stable lives. Research and experience have proven that when a family has all of its basic needs met, they are better able to thrive as a family, as well as individually.

Community Connections focus areas include: Caring Connections, Education, Employment, Health and Housing. We call these basic needs the Five Pillars of Stability, and are happy to provide families with useful resources for any one (or all) of the pillars.

Trauma Assessment and Individualized Care

Children who have been abused or neglected are often exposed to events beyond their ability to cope. This creates child traumatic stress resulting in feelings of fear, helplessness and guilt. A child’s traumatic stress can have long-term effects on the child’s well-being, including higher rates of acute and chronic medical problems, developmental delays, educational disorders and behavioral health problems. Wellpoint Care administers a trauma assessment and creates individualized trauma-informed care plans to help facilitate healing and well-being for children and relative caregivers.   

More Child & Family Well-being

  • Foster Parenting
  • Treatment Foster Care
  • Child Welfare
  • Youth Services


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Maria Andrade headshot- landscape

Meet Maria Andrade

The diversity of the work that I do ensures that no day is like any other.

Read my Story

Meet

Read my Story

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Meet Justin Hughes

Wellpoint Care Network has provided me a positive workplace and allowed me the tools I need…

Read my Story

Meet More of our Caregivers
Maria Andrade

Maria Andrade

Vice President of Child and Family Well-being

I began my career at Wellpoint Care in 2009. The diversity of the work that I do ensures that no day is like any other. I have the opportunity to lead teams who are focused on supporting the work of our mission — because they understand that ultimately the work we do, whether internally or externally, impacts the families we are here to serve. Wellpoint Care has created an environment that allows me to thrive professionally, while supporting my work-life balance in the various seasons of both my professional and personal life. We are allowed opportunities to be innovative and creative together in how we achieve goals while never losing sight of our mission. It’s encouraging to see the result of the organization listening to feedback by providing space for us to come together as an agency and have conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion, and then be a part of the work towards change.

I am a first-generation Puerto Rican, born in the United States and first in my family to have graduated college and continued on to receive master’s degree. I’m bilingual and fully fluent in Spanish. I oversee the Mentoring Program and am a part many other diversity-related committees. Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my loved ones, reading, volunteering and being outside.

Justin Hughes

Justin Hughes

Placement and Caregiver Coordinator Supervisor

BA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

I have been employed with Wellpoint Care Network twice, totaling over 12 years. I was first hired as a Youth Counselor. After five years and receiving a few smaller promotions, I was then promoted to Unit Manager. After over four years in that role, I left in 2017 and returned in 2019 as placement liaison and was later promoted to the Placement and Caregiver Coordinator supervisor. I came back to Wellpoint Care as it has always felt like home to me and has provided me a level of comfort and opportunities for growth personally and professionally. Wellpoint Care has provided me a positive workplace and allowed me the tools I need to successfully serve our community. I continue to choose to work here as I feel wanted and appreciated. More importantly, I receive the challenge that keeps me motivated to come to work every day. Staff work well together and respect one another. I came to Wellpoint Care as I wanted a job fresh out of college and they provided me a career.

I graduated with my bachelor’s degree from UW-Milwaukee.

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