Deputy Director (Posting #170-24)

Deputy Director (Posting #170-24) The NJ Department of Children and Families is seeking a catalytic individual with senior level management experience in child welfare to lead work with kinship families, resource families, and adoption, Kinship Legal Guardianship (KLG), and resource home licensing practice. This position, reporting to the Assistant Commissioner and serving in a high performing senior leadership team, will be responsible for innovating with staff and across divisions to increase the use of kinship care, engagement with resource families, and ensure timely and high-quality adoption and legal guardianship practice across the state. The candidate must be passionate about child welfare work, and knowledgeable of adoption, guardianship, licensing, and resource family policy, practices, and regulation; facility with administrative processes; and have a strong track record of growing and developing staff. NJ DCF is nationally recognized for its advancements in child welfare. Our leadership team knows that the work we do is urgent, and we take bold and strategic steps to produce needed change. Recent examples include:

• New Jersey has invested in staff training, partnerships, and prevention services to sharply and safely reduce the use of foster care – including operating the nation’s largest supportive housing program for child welfare-involved families; statewide family preservation services; a statewide, universally available children’s behavioral health system; and four statewide evidence-based home visiting models. Today New Jersey resorts to the use of foster care placement as a safety intervention the least of any state in the country.
• Through policy, practice and regulatory changes, kinship care is now the most common placement type for children in out of home placement.