<bt>Though she lives in Fairfax County, Dr. Judy Card considers herself a Loudoun County resident by default.
"I like Dulles Town Center," she said. "There are never lines. I like the friendliness of the community and the people. I'm always in Loudoun and I moved to Fairfax right when I got this job so I don't know enough about Fairfax."
The job that drew Dr. Card away from Fairfax and into Loudoun was her current position as the director of MotherNet Loudoun, an organization established in 1994 by INMED, a non-profit, international health and development group.
"[Our] objective is to help families become more self-sufficient...by helping them overcome immediate challenges while also developing short-term and long-term goals and plans to achieve them," said Mary-Lynne Lasco, communications manager for INMED. "We also link families to other appropriate medical, social, educational and vocational resources."
These resources included local libraries, community centers and the Loudoun Literacy Council, a volunteer organization that helps people with reading skills.
MotherNet Loudoun takes a holistic approach to the issue of child care and development through services that range from information on prenatal care, child abuse and teen pregnancy prevention to providing access to health care and, more recently, translation services for Spanish-speaking pregnant women and new mothers.
CARD CAME on board as the director in March 2000 after a childhood spent in Jamestown, N.Y. and Charlottesville, Va.
"I had just finished My Ph.D. at the University of Maryland [in College Park]," she said. Subsequently, she began collaborating with the community, raising funds for her program and directing evaluations for INMED. "Part of my job is to go into the community and attend community meetings and community coalitions as a representative of MotherNet Loudoun."
Helping individuals is nothing new for Card. "I always wanted to be a counseling psychologist," she said. "I knew that I wanted to make an impact now. With my child development background, I looked for jobs that I could [do to] help parents now. Even though I'm not working first-hand with the participants in the program, I feel like it fulfills [the counseling] need in me."
Counseling is a major aspect of the MotherNet Loudoun organization, which is run not by volunteers but by a team of trained family support workers that have close ties to the participating families.
'We do not utilize volunteers for service delivery given the extensive ongoing training required of our staff, the intensive case management involved in home visiting and the long-term commitment needed to maintain an effective relationship with each participating family," Lasco said. MotherNet Loudoun currently helps 55 individual families.
SINCE MOTHERNET LOUDOUN works closely with the Hispanic population of the county, cultural awareness is a bonus of Card's profession. "I've become more culturally competent in seeing things through [other cultures'] eyes than I did before," she said. "Even though people like to say the United States is one big culture, it's very different."
Though MotherNet Loudoun works with many ethnic groups, their services are geared toward Hispanic families that may suffer from language or income barriers. "While participation in MotherNet Loudoun is open to people of all ethnicities, our staff is prepared to provide services and translation in Spanish and English, in response to the greatest needs among Loudoun families," Lasco said.
When day is done, the office is closed and Card is at home watching "Friends" or tending to her house plants, she knows exactly why she works for MotherNet Loudoun. "I'm doing what I'm doing so that I can help in the way that I can...so that more participants in the community can be served to prevent child abuse and neglect and to promote healthy birth outcomes," she said.
"If you don't have a strong foundation from [ages] 0 to 3, then that lends itself to a host of problems throughout the rest of your life," Card said. "That's why I do what I do. And I'm really passionate about that."