Anthony Barrows
Managing Partner and Founder, Center for Behavioral Design and Social Justice
Anthony is a jack of all trades and a master of some, with a background in behavioral design, child welfare, public policy, and fine arts. As someone with personal experience of foster care, public housing, juvenile justice, and safety net programs, Anthony brings lived expertise to his systems change work in the nonprofit and public sectors.
He spent almost 9 years at the applied behavioral science firm ideas42, where he led the economic-justice portfolio, and over 10 years in child welfare, spanning positions from direct service to system improvement.
Anthony is a 2018 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Gleitsman Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA from UMass Boston.
Founder & CEO, Think of Us
Sixto Cancel is a nationally recognized leader driving systems change in child welfare, working across tech, service delivery, research and data, and state and federal policy to improve outcomes for youth and families. He has a proven track record of mobilizing cross-sector partnerships and lived-expertise to drive effective innovation at the local, state, and federal levels to solve both entrenched and emergent challenges.
Samantha Copus
Parent Partner, Jefferson County Parents Supporting Parents
Samantha Copus is a mother to two children and identifies as a person in long-term recovery. Samantha has a variety of lived experiences ranging from mental health, Substance Use Disorders, Domestic Violence, and being a mother who had a child in the child welfare system. All things that qualify her now to serve as a Parent Partner in Jefferson County as part of the Parents Supporting Parents Program.
Bryn Fortune
Fortune Consulting & Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative
Bryn Fortune is the Coordinator for the Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative, focusing on empowering authentic parent voices and advancing early relational health. Fortune Consulting is a professional services firm that provides strategic consulting and advisory services to help organizations achieve their goals.
Chief Strategy Officer, Prevent Child Abuse America
Jennifer Jones serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) where she develops, implements, and advocates for an integrated strategic framework to help grow PCA America’s leadership role consistent with national prevention priorities, and serves as the lead on regional and national strategic partnerships.
Prior to her current role, Jennifer was the Director of the Change in Mind Institute and the Co-Director of the Safety and Resilience Impact Area at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities. Our team at the Institute worked closely with Jennifer as part of Change in Mind. Jennifer has also worked at the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund and the Department of Children and Families.
Jennifer is an affiliate of the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being, in recognition of her collaborative spirit and shared values. Jennifer received her master’s in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and bachelor’s in social work from Marquette University.
Kate Luster
Director, Rock County Department of Human Services
Kate Luster is the Director of Human Services for Rock County, Wisconsin. Kate has over 25 years’ experience in public sector social work practice and administration. In recent years, Kate’s leadership has centered around family-centered systems change in Rock County’s child welfare services by prioritizing prevention, promoting workforce wellbeing, and committing to parent-driven, community-based solutions for families.
Kate holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Social Work from the University of Chicago.
Marlo Nash
Managing Director, Children’s Home Society of America
Marlo Nash is a systems change strategist who is passionate about working with people to achieve big wins over intractable problems. In her role as the managing director of the Children’s Home Society of America (CHSA) nationwide network, she collaborates with CHSA members, public sector leaders, researchers, national partners, philanthropists and lived experts to find ways to build well-being and ensure equity for children and families, and their communities.
Drawing on her certification in results-based leadership, she helps CHSA and its partners use data, landscape analyses, trends, systems culture insights, and an assessment of the Six Conditions of Systems Change to create pathways that establish and achieve meaningful outcomes. One avenue for this work is the Wicked Problems Institute, which is hosted by CHSA and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina School of Social Work. In her role with CHSA, Marlo has the opportunity to help shape the direction and work of Wicked.
Her career has featured work to facilitate connections among federal and state policymakers and public agencies, private human services organizations, issue coalitions and national networks for policy development, advocacy campaigns, systems change leadership, constituent mobilization, and more. She brings a background of advancing policies and systems changes designed to build and restore well-being for children and families through early childhood and child welfare systems. While in the role of Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Network Mobilization at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities (now DBA as Social Current), she led the Alliance network in a collective effort to develop evidence- and practice-informed contributions to the language of the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, the most significant federal child welfare reform law in decades.
Marlo brings a significant background and personal interest in working on behalf of young children and their families. She took her first national role after being recruited to the United Way of America to lead Success By 6, the nation’s largest network of local and state public-private early childhood partnerships at that time. She has also served in leadership roles for Voices for America’s Children and the National Foster Youth Institute.
Before making contributions nationally, Nash spent 10 years with the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, where she served as the Director of Oklahoma KIDS COUNT and Director of Early Childhood Solutions. She was appointed to the Governor’s Task Force on School Readiness, then helped start the Task Force-recommended Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness as the lead strategist working with a bi-partisan cadre of corporate leaders and legislators. Early in her career, she held senior level positions in Oklahoma’s childcare resource and referral system and the Department of Defense’s child care program in Monterey, CA.
Nash lives on the Virginia side of Washington DC with her husband and high school sweetheart, David, with her two adult daughters as neighbors, and their beloved dog, Yogi, who is her running and yoga partner. Her two-year-old god daughter lives in Michigan and she gets great joy from spending time with a growing group of “neighbor grandchildren.”
Blake Roberts Crall
Program Manager, Madison Forward Fund
Blake Roberts Crall is the Program Manager for Madison’s guaranteed income research program, the Madison Forward Fund. She is based at the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison.
Blake is passionate about revolutionizing our social safety net and using direct cash policies as a tool for economic justice. She comes to this work with years of experience on the ground as a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid navigator, managing low-income tax clinics, and with 15 years of experience designing and implementing programs that tackle income inequality and poverty. Her work in public policy focuses on basic/guaranteed income, low-income tax credits, and early childcare systems.
Executive Director, Chapin Hall
Bryan Samuels is the Executive Director of Chapin Hall, a nonprofit policy research institute focused on connecting research to action. Under Bryan’s leadership, Chapin Hall is actively working in more than 40 states in building knowledge and creating solutions with and for public system partners, community leaders and members, and families—all with an aim to improve the wellbeing of children and youth, and ensure all families thrive.
Across his career, Bryan’s work has centered on identifying and addressing inequities using evidence in policymaking. Key accomplishments include the creation and application of a well-being framework based on the best developmental understanding of normal childhood development; formation of a shared and actionable understanding of the effects of exposure to violence, trauma, poverty, and adverse childhood experiences on the mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical health of children; and emphasis on the importance of building the capacity of public and private child- and family-serving systems and organizations to focus on and produce positive outcomes.
Bryan was appointed by President Obama as the Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF), where he served from 2009 to 2013 and leveraged the work of federal departments including Health and Human Services, Justice, and Education, among others, on behalf of children in foster care, youth experiencing housing instability, and families impacted by domestic violence. Bryan’s voice, experience and expertise can be heard throughout the first season of this podcast series; and he has also contributed generously to our Institute’s vision and growth through his partnership and guidance over the past decade.
Allison Thompson, MSS, PhD
Executive Director, UPenn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research
Dr. Allison Thompson is the Executive Director of Penn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research (CGIR), which is an applied research center specializing in cash-transfer research, evaluation, pilot design, and narrative change.
Dr. Thompson has nearly 20 years of experience in applied research, program evaluation, and leadership in operations and management. Prior to her leadership at the CGIR, Dr. Thompson was appointed as the Senior Research Officer for Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families, where she created and led a research team designed to produce actionable data to guide government leaders in decision-making and policy development with a focus on promoting racial equity, mitigating disparities, and utilizing a public health approach to supporting families and communities.
She has experience working with city, state, and county level policymakers, securing and managing multi-million dollar grants, budgets, and contracts, and her work has been featured as a model for best practice by major foundations and federal agencies, such as Casey Family Programs and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Dr. Thompson earned her PhD in Social Welfare from Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) in 2017 and her Master of Social Service from Bryn Mawr College in 2008. She teaches policy, research, and strategic planning courses for the MSW program at SP2.