Methodist Children’s Home Family Outreach offices provide vital support to children and families in a variety of ways though many people are often unaware of the full scope of what these offices do. With several locations across Texas and New Mexico, Family Outreach teams are on the front lines of strengthening families, offering resources, guidance and hope within their communities.
To learn more about the impact and purpose behind this work, Sunshine visited with Traci Wagner, vice president for programs, and Marissa Smith, assistant vice president for programs, to discuss how Family Outreach is helping families thrive.
Q: MCH Family Outreach offers case management services. What does that look like?
Smith: Sometimes case management is as simple as paying a bill or making a referral to a specialist. Other times, it involves parent skill-building, which creates lasting, cyclical change. When cases focus on skill-building, staff spend about a month assessing families’ strengths and needs to tailor services accordingly. We start with what the family considers a priority, even if the assessment suggests other areas for growth.
Services can include parent education, nurture groups and modeling parenting techniques in the home. Families also receive practical support like resume help, job interview coaching and transportation to interviews.
Support extends to schools as well, helping parents navigate special education services and advocate for their children. Many parents don’t know where to start. Staff accompany parents to ARD (Admission, Review and Dismissal) meetings, explain how they work, the laws the school is bound to, how to fill out the paperwork and how to advocate for the child to get the services they need.
Case management usually lasts four to six months but can be as brief as a few days when only immediate help is needed. We meet families where they are.
Q: How does parent education fit in with Family Outreach?
WAGNER: Parent education at MCH is trauma-informed and culturally responsive, focusing on empowerment rather than prescription. The goal is to build protective factors that strengthen families and promote healing.
We offer parent education in person, virtually or through hybrid models — wherever families can gather. During the pandemic, we adapted creatively, and post-COVID we remain flexible, delivering education in our offices, in homes or at partner sites. As Marissa noted about case management, we love partnering with agencies, churches and like-minded organizations to extend parent education to the communities they serve. Recently, we completed a series in collaboration with Head Start. We go wherever we’re invited — as long as it’s safe and aligned with our mission. This is an area where we truly excel.
We use several curricula, with our standout being Nurturing Parenting, an evidence-based program that promotes empathy, self-worth, appropriate discipline and parent-child bonding. It covers topics like child development, positive discipline and managing stress, usually delivered in group sessions but adaptable for in-home family units.
Our most-used curriculum is Connected Caregivers, an adaptation of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) created in-house over a decade ago. It breaks down TBRI into practical, skills-based applications for all caregivers, regardless of their family situation.
Another unique offering is Parent Cafe, a community-building model focused on fostering social connections among parents and caregivers. Facilitated discussions are framed around the Strengthening Families Protective Factors, which include parental resilience, social connections, knowledge of parenting and child development, concrete support in times of need, and social-emotional competence of children. This framework also guides our case management approach.
Q: What are the differences between kinship care and foster care?
Smith: Kinship care is when a child is raised by a family member, such as a grandparent, aunt or uncle, or by a close friend. At MCH, we support kinship families through our regular case management services and parent education. For example, we help grandparents caring for their grandchildren with the same commitment and resources we offer all families.
In foster care, we license both traditional foster families and kinship families under the same process. Whether you’re a grandparent or another family member, the pre-service trainings, licensing requirements, placement, monitoring and support are consistent for all foster homes.
However, Texas is moving toward lessening the licensing requirements specifically for kinship families. This change aims to make it easier and quicker for kinship homes to become licensed, prioritizing placing children with relatives rather than unrelated foster families. Once these new standards are in place, MCH will license kinship families separately but continue to provide the same services and support offering TBRI and case management regardless of relation to the child.
We want to support kinship families even more, especially when grandparents adopt children in their care. We extend ongoing case management to walk alongside these families, recognizing the challenges they face, including limited resources. Our goal is to ensure grandparents and other kinship caregivers have the help they need to provide stable, loving homes.
This work is vital and one of our favorite parts of what we do because research shows children do better living with relatives than in unrelated foster or adoptive homes. Often, kinship families just lack the resources. By providing financial assistance, case management and support, we help keep children with those who know and love them best.
Q: If someone is not near a Family Outreach office, can they still receive help?
Wagner: When possible, we provide services like parent education by phone or virtually, expanding our reach through technology. Community training is also a key part of our work, serving as the consultation and training arm of our programs.
MCH staff frequently travel either individually or in small teams to conferences or by invitation to partner with like-minded organizations and community groups. That certainly doesn’t keep us within the bounds of Texas and New Mexico, even though Texas and New Mexico are our charter and get priority services from us.
Smith: Our case management services weren’t originally designed to be virtual, and many believe these services are most effective in person. While parent education can be fully virtual, there’s something unique about being physically present in a family’s living room when doing deeper, more personal work.
That said, we recognize the importance of flexibility, especially in New Mexico, where some families live hours away. We’re committed to meeting families’ needs, whether in person or virtually, and adapting as necessary. Though offering more virtual support is still relatively new for us, it’s an important step toward greater accessibility.
When families need services beyond what we provide, we help connect them with other agencies and work closely with like-minded partners to ensure comprehensive support.
Wagner: Collaboration is key to meeting the full range of family needs.
Q: I’m told that two of the biggest misconceptions about MCH Family Outreach offices are first, that people don’t even know that they exist and second, that all locations have residential living. (Only the Waco MCH campus and Boys Ranch have on-site residences).
Wagner: We definitely encounter that. We’ve been in some of these communities well over 40, 50 years, and it’s a continual focus for us to make sure we have a footprint and that we’re making an impact in the communities where we’re located and beyond.
I would say the other myth about Family Outreach is that there is a certain type of family or demographic that could benefit from outreach services. There have been seasons in my parenting life where I could have benefited from MCH services. I tend to think that we have something to offer to anyone who’s open to it, regardless of the need. If MCH doesn’t have something that fits or can intervene appropriately, we probably know someone who can come alongside that family for whatever the situation is.
We love the term ‘warm handoffs.’ We like creative yesses, but when we can’t say yes, we pride ourselves on making a warm handoff to a like-minded organization or a community partner or local pastor, whatever the case may be.
Q: If someone is not near a Family Outreach office, can they still receive help?
Smith: Absolutely. Families often contact us when they’re already at a breaking point, saying things like, “I just want my kid out of my home. He needs something more.” It’s disheartening because if they had reached out two years earlier, there would have been many opportunities to provide support before things escalated.
That really ties into what Traci said about our services being for everyone. When I started as a case manager in Waco, I worked with several families where either the husband or wife was a doctor, and they had plenty of resources but still needed significant behavioral support for their children. If they had asked for help earlier, the impact could have been very different.
Q: Is there anything else you feel is important to share?
Smith: I think maybe this is broad, but one thing to mention is that the large purpose of what we do in outreach services is preventative in nature. While our donors often know about our campus and residential care, which is an incredible service, the real win is when our outreach locations are doing prevention well. That means we’re helping prevent kids from having to be removed from their homes to enter foster care or residential care.
WAGNER: At its heart, Family Outreach is about meeting families where they are, offering flexible, compassionate support that spans the full continuum of care. Whether it’s early prevention to keep children safely at home or deeper intervention when challenges arise, our commitment remains the same: walking alongside families with respect, empathy and tailored services that truly make a difference. This flexibility and dedication ensure that no matter a family’s situation or where they live, MCH is there to provide hope, healing and lasting support.
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