Family Support Worker - Healthy Families

At The New York Foundling, we trust in the power and potential of people, and we deliberately invest in proven practices. From bold beginnings in 1869, our New York-based nonprofit has supported hundreds of thousands of our neighbors on their own paths to stability, strength, and independence.  We help children and families navigate through and beyond foster care. We help families struggling with conflict and poverty grow strong. We help individuals with developmental disabilities live their best lives, and we help our neighbors access quality health and mental health services—core to building lifelong resilience and wellbeing. Together, our interrelated programs provide a whole-person, whole-family, and whole-life approach that unlocks solutions for a lifetime.

The Healthy Families – Staten Island program’s goals are to build and sustain community partnerships to systematically engage overburdened families in home visiting services prenatally or at birth, to cultivate and strengthen nurturing parent-child relationships, to promote healthy childhood growth and development, and enhance family functioning by reducing risk and building protective factors. The Family Support Worker/Specialist is responsible for conducting weekly home visits to prenatal and new parents on Staten Island.

Job Responsibilities:

• Providing regular home visits to parents/caregivers
• Inititiating and maintaining regular contact with families, primarily in the homes.
• Establishing a trusting relationship with families; involving the family or other support systems in the individual's treatment; welcoming all interested family members in home visits, and work to engage fathers (or father-figures) in particular.
• Ensuring families are seeing at the frequency prescribed by the model and per supervisor’s guidance. Families are offered weekly home visits for a minimum of six months after the birth of the baby. Home visits typically run 50-60 minutes. Upon meeting the defined criteria for family functioning, visit frequency is reduced to biweekly visits, monthly visits, and quarterly visits and services are tapered off over time. During times of crisis families may be seen 2 or more times in a week.
• Providing prenatal and other health education
• Assisting to strengthen parent-child relationships
• Assisting parents to improve their skills to optimize the home environment for the child’s well-being and safety
• Assisting in making and attending health and human service appointments, including activities related to employment and educational goals
• Responsible for collaboration and collateral contacts to other service providers involved with the family
• Completing weekly paperwork and data entry, including descriptive narratives of each home visit and data forms.
• Maintaining up to date case records for each family. Maintain clear, concise and accurate documentation of progress that promote peer and supervisory review and feedback, and that demonstrates compliance with model and meeting our agency’s expectation. Assure documentation (data entry) for contacts, incidents, and reports are submitted timely (as indicated by program).

The New York Foundling is committed to attracting and retaining a diverse employee population, the Foundling will honor your experiences, perspectives and unique identity. Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable and welcoming.

Must hold a high school diploma/GED or equivalent

Bachelor’s Degree preferred.

Valid NYS Driver’s License

Other Requirements: 

• Comfortable driving the agency vehicle with/without participants
• Experience in working with or providing services to children and families
• An ability to establish trusting relationships
• Acceptance of individual differences
• Experience and willingness to work with the culturally diverse populations that are present among the program's target population
• Knowledge of infant and child development
• Open to reflective practice (i.e. has capacity for introspection, communicates awareness of self in relation to others, recognizes value of supervision)
• Ability to maintain appropriate professional boundaries
• Ability to identify family strengths and foster self-sufficiency and independence in families
• Respect for and sensitivity to the needs and rights of others, including those with differing cultural, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities