As Community Engagement and Systems Change are a core service area of the ICFW, collaboration with our community and systems partners is critical to fulfilling our mission. In recognition of those that value collaboration and whose mission seeks to improve child and family well-being, we have invited those partners to join us as ICFW Affiliates. We are honored to introduce our three newest ICFW Affiliates with whom we look forward to partnering with now and into the future.
Penny Dixon
Penny Dixon is the Shelter Manager at the Milwaukee Women’s Center, a division of Community Advocates.
Penny joined the Well-Being Team and the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being in 2015 as a licensed professional counselor with extensive experience training foster parents in the greater Milwaukee area. In her role as a clinician and trainer for the Institute, she quickly mastered and provided several well-validated child mental health treatment models – Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – to families involved in the child welfare systems.
Penny also utilized Human-Centered Design to develop a psycho-social education group focused on trauma and resilience at the Community Advocates’ Milwaukee Women’s Center shelter. In 2019, Penny assumed the manager role of Community Advocates’ Milwaukee Women’s Center shelter, an emergency facility for families affected by homelessness and/or domestic violence. In this new role, Penny continues to collaborate with the ICFW on bringing trauma-responsive practices to the Women’s Center shelter through the HOMES initiative.
Tim Grove
Tim Grove is a senior consultant at SaintA, a human services agency whose mission is to facilitate equity, learning, healing and wellness for all.
Tim’s partnership with the ICFW team has a long and deep history. Both Tim and ICFW Co-Director Gabe McGaughey led child welfare case management programs at their respective organizations during a time of significant transition. ICFW Co-Director Josh Mersky and Clinical Director Dimitri Topitzes worked closely with Tim when evaluating an implementation project at SaintA funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Led by Tim, the initiative integrated a comprehensive trauma-informed case management system within several child welfare service units. Results of the evaluation were published in the Journal of Child Custody. In 2011, Drs. Mersky and Topitzes also partnered with SaintA to test an innovative training model with foster parents and children, Project Connect. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this successful initiative helped launch the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being.
Tim’s dedication and advocacy around advancing trauma-informed care has been the foundation for transformation change at a wide range of organizations and in our community. His willingness to authentically collaborate and thoughtfully pursue improvements in practice, policy, and systems highlight just a few of the reasons we’re excited about Tim joining the ICFW as an Affiliate.
Reggie Moore
Reggie Moore serves as the Injury and Violence Prevention Director of the Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) located within the City of Milwaukee’s Health Department.
In that role, Reggie led the effort to develop the Blueprint for Peace, Milwaukee’s first comprehensive plan to address violence prevention from a public health perspective. The Blueprint includes six goals and 30 strategies. It was developed through merging extensive community input and the best available evidence, providing a scaffolding to support cross-system collaboration and change efforts. Other OVP programs such as Trauma Response Initiative, ReCAST MKE, and 414Life view addressing trauma as vital to violence prevention and community resilience.
Reggie also serves on the Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee (SWIM) steering committee and leads the group’s Policy Action Team. In that role, he’s worked with ICFW Co-Director Gabe McGaughey around the opportunity to align SWIM’s policy work with the Blueprint for Peace. Reggie’s commitment to social justice and willingness to collaborate across silos is an asset to advancing systems change in our community.