When Ashleigh Barney was a kid, she wanted to be a family advocate. “How I knew that such a job existed, I don’t know. But I always knew I wanted to work with families.”
As the director of treatment foster care at Extra Special Parents (ESP), a therapeutic foster care agency based in Richmond, she now heads up a team that recruits, licenses and trains foster parents to take in kids with special mental and physical challenges.
“We’re there to provide support for them,” says the Scott’s Addition resident. “We receive referrals from local departments of social services, from Richmond to Washington County across the state. We help them find the foster parent that could meet the individualized needs of the kiddo.”
Born in Portsmouth into a military family, Barney lived in assorted exotic places—Korea, Japan, Florida—before settling back to Chesapeake as a teen. She originally connected with ESP when she worked there as an intern during the second year of her master’s residency (she studied social work) at Virginia Commonwealth University. “I’ve been here ever since,” she says.
“Ms. Barney has a high success rate as she works to ensure matches between youth in foster care and waiting foster families,” says Catherine MacDonald, director of community engagement and outreach at the School of Gerontology at VCU. She has followed Barney’s work throughout the community and calls her “an unsung hero who works late into the evening day after day, year after year, driven by her passion to help the young people in Richmond who most need support.”
Barney believes in that old saying: It takes a village to raise a child.
“I know some of my parents are tired of hearing me say it. But community is so important. We’re going through an interesting time when the state is pushing toward kinship care, or relative care, and we’ve seen a lot of kids get placed with relatives rather than coming into foster care. My hope is that every child has access to the same kind of support.”
She adds that the ultimate goal is for her job “to not exist, and for kids to not have to enter foster care.”
