(Posted 2024 February)
Meet Melody!
Position: Clinical Services Program Manager
Some might call me a professional juggler because I manage three programs that support Clinical Services to those impacted by domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking, and stalking. This includes Counseling Services, ADAPT (Anger & Domestic Abuse Prevention & Treatment), with the support of a third program, Quality Assurance. This last program includes the intake coordinator function, as well as support around managing data and continuous quality improvement of our practice.
I’m not originally from around here. I spent the formative years of my life—10 to 19—outside of Atlanta. Growing up, my mom went to the University of Georgia to get her MSW and worked in an adoption agency. My father was a minister who also did a lot of counseling services, so I was inundated on all sides by helping professions. When it came time for me to decide what to do, I had moved through choices such as garbage management—I thought it was great they made the world a cleaner place--then to nursing, but I discovered that involved a lot of science and math.
I ended up choosing psychology to be different from my parents. I took sociology classes, which led me to my MSW. By the time I graduated undergrad—I thought I’d do research—I was drawn to social justice and the recognition that people in systems are better served when we address systems issues, which is why I ended up at Florida State University for my MSW. I went straight through. I was young.
I love the diversity of this work. Social work is so broad; it’s one of the things I love about it. You can work in policy, legislature, hospitals, with the elderly, with children, do therapy. Sometimes that’s a wonderful thing, but sometimes it’s a terrible thing because you have to pick.
I said I’d never work in child welfare—until I did it. For my last year MSW internship, I had to leave Tallahassee--because there were not enough internship options--and went to Jacksonville to work with victim services. While doing that, I connected with an organization called the Children’s Crisis Center. In Florida they contract out pieces of their child protective services system, specifically those involving assessments of physical abuse or sexual abuse in children ages 0-11. This organization did forensic interviewing and medical evaluations. They offered me a job after graduation, and I took it.
This is why you never say never. I said I’d never work in child welfare. It sounded awful. But that job was the door that led me to many years of working in child welfare. I didn’t last terribly long in that first position; it was in Florida, and I was homesick. While I was in college, my parents moved to Virginia. So, I came here. It’s interesting because it’s never the actual jobs that take me places. It’s been volunteer and internships. I volunteered for a men’s program (a precursor to ADAPT). They did groups for those who cause harm. I made a connection with the other facilitator, who worked for DFS, and got a job in Foster Care.
Fairfax County has been my career home for a long time. I started in 1995. I stayed in Foster Care until early 2023--in some form of child welfare. Most of it was in Foster Care, but I also worked in residentials, treatment, and home-based. Just all the subsets of all these families experiencing trauma, chaos, and behavioral issues with children.
I have one word for working in Fairfax County: growth. The last 10 years in child welfare, I was a supervisor for Foster Care, and it was probably the biggest growth of my career. Having custody of 50+ children and maintaining their well-being, while also supporting families to move to some form of permanency really helped me see the bigger issues we as a community in Fairfax County are dealing with. One of those issues is domestic violence. It is a large part of reasons why children—maybe they didn’t enter foster care because they were direct victims—but domestic violence contributed to the reasons children ended up in foster care. It tended to be a large part of the families we worked with.
I’m still growing. When the program manager position opened in Domestic and Sexual Violence Services [in 2023], I thought this would be an excellent experience to create better support for families where domestic violence is present. It would give me space to create a place for these families to find stability. That is a very long-term goal. It is part of what I thought I’d bring to this position.
There’s so much to love about social work! There’s something about what connects social workers together, this desire to create a better community, a better world for people. If you meet a social worker who works in oncology or hospice, there’s something common about our mission. We have a common core value of seeing the things happening in the systems and the world that contribute to where we find people hurting and needing support. There’s a common goal regardless of the populations we are serving. I love that I can meet another social worker and we can immediately have a conversation! It’s easy to connect to the passion for healing systems that harm people. We do bigger work than just meeting the needs of the individual people who come to us.
Of course, this work is not without its challenges. The biggest one has always been that we are the safety net for so many humans, but we are so under-resourced and underfunded. People really feel it when our safety nets break. But there’s not the kind of investment I wish there could be. Investing in spaces like Head Start, school social workers, and child welfare—these are the places we really could impact community stability. When we are underfunded and serving more than we can wrap our arms around, we are not doing the bigger calling, which is to message out what needs to shift. We end up putting out fires more.
Still, I find ways to disconnect. If I pick up my phone, I’m in it and my heart rate gets faster and my blood pressure gets higher. I do not have the skill to disconnect. Once I’m in, I’m in. As a result, I am pretty good at turning it off when I’m home. I don’t look at my phone (unless I’m on call!). Over the years—I’ve been doing social work a very long time—I’ve learned that it’ll be there waiting for me when I come back. What I enjoy about it is there is so much reward in the moments of the work so I can come back, pick up, and keep going. I don’t carry the burden on my shoulders. For my own sanity in child welfare, I had to create some boundaries. It helps if you love what you’re doing. I’ve always done jobs where I feel connected to the mission, where they match my values. I know how not to look at my computer and my phone when I leave the office.
I really make this work-life balance work for my me time. I create spaces that nourish me outside of work. I am a homebody. I love puttering around my house, reading, and walking outside. I really like being outdoors. I have several really close groups of friends I enjoy being with. Sometimes we go on group trips. But I’m a bit of an introvert. I’m pretty content to have a life where I can nurture myself in my home and also leave it to be with people who are meaningful to me.
I have a daughter in college; she’s a junior at Arizona State. So, I’m an empty nester, which has led me to think of next steps and community involvement. I’m passionate about children who leave foster care, so I’m exploring organizations and volunteer opportunities that do that work.
It’s in the genes. My daughter’s considering law school or something that changes how the world is. I’ve passed along my interest in social justice. She swears she’s not going to be a social worker, but I said the same thing.
Join our team to discover why I enjoy working with DFS so much.
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