Your State, Your Services
Delois Roseboro
HS/245
October 5, 2015
Ramona Smerz

Your State, Your Services
I live in North Carolina. The North Carolina department of children and families is called the North Carolina Division of Social Services. The website is http://www2.ncdhhs.gov/. Their mission statement is ”The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, in collaboration with its partners, protects the health and safety of all North Carolinians and provides essential human services. (NC DSS).” This website has a lot of different services. Some deal with giving your child up and getting them adopted. They have Medicare and Medicaid reform links; adult protection, nutrition, disabilities, and homeless services. There are a lot of different programs for people of all ages and different conditions including blind and deaf individuals. They don’t specifically have a service for children who get in trouble a lot or act out a lot, but they have counseling programs. This is a good resource to have. They have numbers and names for you to call, and I’m not sure if you can apply for benefits online. I know you can receive help for problems over the phone. I looked everywhere on this website and found that they don’t have a social media presence. All they have is a bunch of numbers for a variety of different services. In their list of services, they actually have a lot of different numbers for adult and child abuse and neglect.
Assistance Programs
SNAP
There are many assistance programs included on this website. There’s some for many situations that people face and need help with every day. They have a program like SNAP. It’s called Food and Nutrition Services (FNS). It’s a food program for low income families. The purpose of this program is to end hunger and improve health and nutrition (NC DSS). They don’t necessarily have everything about this program on the website. It’s in a document you can download. The amounts of income you can receive depend on your house size and your household income. They have a chart of the maximum amount of money you can have with a certain amount of children and the maximum amount of benefits you can receive. It also shows how to find out if you’re eligible for assistance if you have more children than 6. The benefits received from this program may not be used to buy tobacco, pet food, paper products, soap products, or alcoholic beverages.
Employment First This website didn’t really have a link just for helping people with disabilities get jobs. They have a link for helping a lot of different groups of people get jobs. It’s called Work First. It’s basically like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It’s there to help families with low income, but there’s a certain amount of time you can receive this assistance. This program’s purpose is to provide assistance while helping the guardian get a job so they can be self-sufficient. It comes with a time limit because its main goal is to make families more independent. This site says that most families will make it to that point where they can live happily. Some families will have a harder time because of things like disabilities. It has a history of this program also. It was started by Executive Order of Gov. Jim Hunt in July 1995. In July 1996 he obtained grants from the government that allowed him to add time limits and work requirements. In July 1999, legislation gave identified local governments significant control over their Work First programs. Work First cash assistance is primarily for children. Children 17 or under the family will be eligible for this program. If the parent is under 18, they have to be living with an approved adult and remain in school.

Refugee Resettlement I’ve never heard of this before, but this site has something on it. This website also has a number for this. It’s called the North Carolina Refugee Assistance Program NC-RAP. This is a short term transitional service that provides refugees and other eligible populations with assistance, and helps them become independent in this new society. It has two main services, Refugee Public Assistance and Refugee Social Services. The social service program part including employment services, case management, English language training, citizenship immigration services, transportation, vocational skills training including Drivers Education and vocational education, translation, interpretation services, skills recertification, social adjustment services including information and referral, emergency services, and health-related services (NC DSS). Also it provides education for refugee children, assistance for older refugees and health screenings. This is another place where they have the application and all the requirements are on a document you can download. It has a lot of information on this topic; it shows the types of people who are eligible for this program like Asylees, certain Cuban/ Haitian entrants and parolees, victims of human trafficking, and a few more people. It also shows where the most refugees will go and the percent that will go to that place. It also has a graph and the number of people that will go to each place. It has PowerPoints where you can learn more information if you’re a refugee and there’s numbers you can call and people you can email to get help.
Low Income Energy Assistance Program I’ve never heard of this program either, but sure enough this was on there. It doesn’t have as much information on this as on the other topics, but there’s enough. The Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP) is a federally-funded program that provides a onetime payment to help eligible households pay for their heating bills (NC DSS). To be eligible for this program you have to have at least one person, U.S. citizen or not, who meets the eligibility criteria, meet an income test, have reserves at or below $2,250, be responsible for its heating bills (NC DSS). Only households containing an elderly person age 60 and above or a disabled persons receiving services through the Division of Aging and Adult Services (DAAS) are eligible to potentially receive benefits from December 1st through December 31st or until funds are exhausted (NC DSS). They also have a link to The Crisis Intervention Program (CIP). This is also federally-funded program that helps eligible families pay for heating and cooling in case of an emergency.

References
Bibliography
NC DSS. (n.d.). Retrieved September 30, 2015, from ncdhhs.gov: http://www2.ncdhhs.gov/dss/about/mission.htm