Department of Social Services in Child Protection Services and Foster Care/Adoption in Lexington, Virginia (2006)

My six-week summer in Virginia was revelatory. Part of my work with the Department of Social Services (DSS) was finding residential placements for youth in foster care. I quickly moved away from a romanticized vision of the poor after witnessing many people refuse to utilize social services or repeatedly abuse the generosity of compassionate people. Through my interactions with the clients, I encountered impoverished people who were given opportunities and provided with means to improve their situations but who were unwilling to accept such offers, even with the threat of being sent to jail or losing custody of their children.  Unsatisfied with the opportunities at hand, some of my clients asked for more from the DSS, the government, the courts and others.

I recognized that the services that the DSS offered, even if accepted, did little to change the much larger structural and societal issues that contributed to an individual’s personal situation.  In light of these experiences, I came to see the tension in distinguishing when to show compassion – cutting someone slack for their unfortunate position – and when to argue for the implementation of the law – making people accept the consequences for their actions or inactions.

Working with the marginalized and living a life of service certainly stayed on my mind as I graduated from Middlebury: I worked for a time in residential care for adults with developmental disabilities, and I tried out religious life as a nun in a convent. I hadn’t realized what a deep-seeded desire I had tapped into during my Shepherd Internship in 2006 until four years later, in 2010, when I started working at Germaine Lawrence, a residential treatment program for teenage girls.

“This is how my heart beats,” I told myself. This is why it beats. The sustained and involved work at Germaine Lawrence gave me experiences and a more complete language to articulate the tension that I scratched during my Shepherd internship.  I became acutely aware of deeper sufferings of the poor, the trauma, mental illness, developmental disabilities, and so many other factors. I started to make sense of why the clients in Virginia didn’t improve their situations when it had seemed to me that they denied and refused every opportunity to change.

I think back very fondly on my summer in Lexington, VA. The important but limited interaction I had with young people left me wanting to work directly with them in similar therapeutic settings. I have recently begun a three-year program for a dual Master’s degree in Social Work and Theology & Ministry at Boston College.  I’m especially interested in the importance of trauma-informed care in clinical work and what it would look like to create trauma-informed communities.

Marie Lucci is a member of the class of 2008.