The Program and History

The Continuum of Care (COC), a division of the S.C. Department of Children's Advocacy, was established by the South Carolina legislature in 1983 and is a program that serves children with the most severe and complex emotional or behavioral health challenges through a strengths-based and culturally-competent service delivery model. The COC is led by Division Manager Greg Wright. 

Through Wraparound services, our objective is to empower youth and families to help them realize their hopes and dreams, decrease out of home placements, improve school attendance and performance, decrease interactions with the legal system, and enhance the overall quality of life of the child.

Mission: The mission of Continuum of Care (COC) is to ensure continuing development and delivery of appropriate services to those children with the most severe and complex emotional or behavioral health challenges whose needs are not being adequately met by existing services and programs.

In order to carry out this mission, the COC provides intensive care coordination through a care planning process called Wraparound. Wraparound is a team based approach to caring for families with complicated needs. COC ensures the special needs of our families are met by augmenting existing resources to create a full-service array that ensures our youth have access to services and supports needed in order to be served in the least restrictive, most appropriate setting.

Wraparound approach: The Wraparound approach is designed to empower youth and their families and to help them reach their family vision and goals through engagement, planning, implementation and transition. 

Continuum of Care Principles: The Wraparound approach is based on 10 guiding principles purposed to empower youth and their families and to help them reach their family vision and goals.

1. Family Voice and Choice: Family and youth/child perspectives are intentionally elicited and prioritized during all phases of the Wraparound process. Planning is grounded in family members’ perspectives, and the team strives to provide options and choices such that the plan reflects family values and preferences.

2. Team Based: The Wraparound team consists of individuals agreed upon by the family and committed to them through informal, formal, and community support and service relationships.

3. Natural Supports: The team actively seeks out and encourages the full participation of team members drawn from family members’ networks of interpersonal and community relationships. The Wraparound plan reflects activities and interventions that draw on sources of natural support.

4. Collaboration: Team members work cooperatively and share responsibility for developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating a single wraparound plan. The plan reflects a blending of team members’ perspectives, mandates, and resources. The plan guides and coordinates each team member’s work towards meeting the team’s goals.

5. Community-based: The Wraparound team implements service and support strategies that take place in the most inclusive, most responsive, most accessible, and least restrictive settings possible and that safely promote child and family integration into home and community life.

6. Culturally Competent: The Wraparound process demonstrates respect for and builds on the values, preferences, beliefs, culture, and identity of the child/youth, family, and their community.

7. Individualized: To achieve the goals laid out in the Wraparound plan, the team develops and implements a customized set of strategies, supports, and services.

8. Strengths Based: The Wraparound process and the wraparound plan identify, build on, and enhance the capabilities, knowledge, skills, and assets of the child and family, their community, and other team members.

9. Persistence: Despite challenges, the team persists in working toward the goals included in the Wraparound plan until the team reaches agreement that a formal wraparound process is no longer required.

10. Outcome Based: The team ties the goals and strategies of the wraparound plan to observable or measurable indicators of success, monitors progress in terms of these indicators, and revises the plan accordingly.

Qualifying for Services and More Information 

For detailed information on services, eligibility, how to apply and more, visit the Continuum of Care website.

Advocacy. Accountability. Service.