Victoria Tucker’s Career in Adoption and Foster Care – The Heights

As a freshman at Boston College, Victoria Tucker thought she wanted to be a teacher, but her academic advisor disagreed.

“He said, “Victoria, you don’t want to be a teacher… You sound like you want to be a social worker,” said Tucker, BC ’12 and SSW ’13.

When her academic advisor first suggested a possible career change, Tucker hesitated. She knew she wanted to help children, but she wasn’t sure if social work was the right path.

But when she interned at an adoption agency the summer after her freshman year, she knew social work was the career for her.

“When I came back that second year, I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” Tucker said.

From there, Tucker joined BC’s dual training to obtain her bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in social work over a five-year process.

“Working with kids kind of became my passion,” Tucker said. “I started as a teacher and ended up as a social worker.”

Today, Tucker oversees the adoption unit of The house for little wanderers (HLW), a nonprofit child and family services organization in Boston.

The HLW was also where Tucker had some of her first experiences in social work; her first practical training as a student was at HLW, where she supported parents at risk of losing custody or whose children were returning home from foster care.

During her field experience, one of the mothers Tucker worked with asked her to come to her child’s medical appointment. At this appointment, the child received a life-changing diagnosis.

“I will always remember being the person who supported her through that,” Tucker said. “Not her family, no one else in her life, but it was me.”

After graduating from Boston College in 2013, Tucker worked at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and the Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange.

Caryn Lister, who has worked in the adoption field for 28 years, knew Tucker through both jobs. Part of Tucker’s work involved referring children stuck in foster care to adoption agencies, one of which Lister worked for. Through this process, Lister said Tucker became a friendly face.

When Lister started working at HLW, she encouraged Tucker to apply for the organization’s open adoption counselor position.

“(I) really respected her work and the way she manages a team,” Lister said. “So I always had some sort of vision of working directly with her on a team.”

In 2021, Tucker got the job and began her new role with the HLW.

“What I always tell people is never burn a bridge,” Tucker said. “Connections you make in life, you never know where they’re going to lead,” Tucker said.

One of the most important parts of Tucker’s job is overseeing the HLW staff. Lucy Collins, one of these employees, works to recruit, train and supervise foster parents. Collins said she appreciates Tucker’s approach as a supervisor during this process.

“She doesn’t try to tell me how to do things,” Collins said. “She helps me work through it so I can learn how to do it. She helps me solve problems. She’s good at that. ”

Collins and Tucker work together to facilitate this Massachusetts Approach to Partnerships in Parenting training, a 30-hour course that potential foster and adoptive parents must complete before beginning the foster or adoption process. Through this partnership, Collins said she has noticed Tucker’s strengths in interacting with the families.

“When she meets someone, she has a really good intuition about where their strengths are or what challenges they will face,” Collins said.

Tucker also completes assessments of children hoping to be adopted and home studies of the families seeking to adopt. She then decides whether to approve a family, deny it, or postpone an adoption if certain criteria still need to be met.

Tucker said she sees the impact of her BC education in the work she does. During her graduation, one of her professors had students go around the room and pretend to greet each other as if they were greeting the children they were going to work with.

“The first interaction we have with families and with children can set the tone for what your experience with them will be,” Tucker said. “That was something I hadn’t really even thought about, but it was something that came up in class and has stuck in my mind ever since.”

During her eight years of working and collaborating with Tucker, Lister said she picked up Tucker’s special knowledge of the adoption process and the power of probing prospective parents, preparing families who adopt children with trauma, and expressing the needs of a child or family through written reports.

“She’s just an authentic, good social worker,” Lister said. “She gets it.”

However, some adoptions are easier than others. If a child has extensive medical needs, Tucker says it can be more difficult to find a family for him or her. Still, Tucker said she is proud of the way she was able to help these children.

“I’m really proud of how some of those turned out,” Tucker said. “There were a lot of barriers and we were able to kind of overcome them and get the child adopted.”

One difficult adoption process involved a 17-year-old boy who had not yet been adopted, Tucker said. All he wanted before his 18th birthday was to start a family, Tucker said, but those around him had already lost hope. Tucker counted down the days and sought out families, and he was adopted just two days before his birthday.

“The kids who really, really want to be adopted when they’re older, and want family, and for it to happen for them … those are the kids I think about a lot,” Tucker said.

In the future, Tucker hopes to learn more about genealogy and DNA testing to help adoptees know who their birth parents are. She said she passionately believes that if children are curious about their biological families, they should be given the opportunity to learn more about them.

Although she works with families throughout the adoption process, Tucker says the best part of her job is one of the final steps: placing the children in their new homes.

“(I love) seeing how kids can just be kids despite all the trauma they’ve been through,” Tucker said. “You walk into the house and you would never know it because they’re just comfortable.”

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