Mike Watkins takes North Florida’s foster care playbook to the Permian Basin

North Florida’s biggest experiment in child welfare is headed west. About 1,200 miles west.

Mike Watkins, the longtime CEO of NWF Health Network, will serve as founding CEO of the newly formed West Texas Community Network, carrying the community-based, faith-aligned foster care model he built in North Florida to 30 counties in the Permian Basin, centered in Midland.

He isn’t giving up his day job. Watkins will keep running NWF Health Network while he gets the Texas operation on its feet.

The launch follows the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ decision to tap West Texas Community Network to lead the state’s Rural Community-Based Care Pilot Program. The pilot was created by Senate Bill 513, carried by two Midland Republicans, Sen. Kevin Sparks and Rep. Tom Craddick.

“I see remarkable parallels between West Texas and West Florida,” Watkins said. “Both regions possess strong local identities, value family, and have active churches and faith partners — and they don’t instinctively look to Austin or Tallahassee to solve their problems. These communities are prepared to take care of their own. They simply need the authority and resources to do so.”

Texas noticed the track record. NWF Health Network manages community-based care for family strengthening and foster care across an 18-county region of North Florida, overseeing $280 million in care covering more than 65,000 lives, according to the organization.

The network says it runs on administrative overhead below 2%, among the leanest in managed care, and hit a 43% permanency placement rate within 12 months, a figure it calls a national high. It also counts nearly 400 family reunifications and more than 500 adoptions.

“Government has an essential responsibility to protect its citizens — investigate abuse, protect children from imminent danger and hold systems accountable,” Watkins said. “But government was never designed to raise children. Communities were. Families were. The community-centered, faith-based model restores the proper division of responsibility while restoring agency to communities and their faith partners — and the results speak for themselves.”

Faith partners sit at the center of the model, not on the donor list. NWF’s Faith Summit has funded local churches directly through congregation-based grants for behavioral health and teen methamphetamine prevention.

In May, that work went national. NWF Health Network co-presented the National Child Protection Faith Summit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, where faith leaders, policymakers and child protection practitioners gathered around family strengthening and foster care.

“Faith leaders were encouraged to hold awareness Sundays, collect backpacks or recruit foster parents — but rarely invited to share responsibility for how children and families were directly served, as James 1:27 calls them to do,” Watkins said.

Florida pioneered the approach. Community-based care was first conceived under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, and Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ administration has kept the state behind it, with lead agencies like NWF Health Network running locally accountable, family-focused child protection systems.

Washington is catching up. President Donald Trump‘s Nov. 13 executive order, “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families,” put foster care reform on the national agenda, and the related “A Home for Every Child”initiative from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had signed up all 50 states as of this month.

“The next great reform for foster care is keeping kids safely in their own communities, and that is only possible by returning care and oversight to the communities where children live,” Watkins said. “This movement must extend beyond Florida and Texas and become a national restoration of responsibility.”

They have been pulling value out of the ground in the Permian Basin for a century. Watkins is betting the next big strike gets measured in forever families, not barrels.

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Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.