Meet Our Staff and Consultants

Our diverse team of staff and consultants with the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids has decades of experience in child welfare. Having worked both on the front lines and in leadership positions, we can provide your agency with key insights and knowledge of recruitment and retention practices that work.

Staff

Jill May, Director
jillmay@adoptex.org

Jill May, L.M.S.W., has more than 10 years of experience in the child welfare system. Prior to her current role as the director of the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids, Jill served as the New Mexico Foster Care and Adoption Bureau chief for five years. She has extensive experience with foster care and adoption, using implementation science to create and sustain system change, and implementing a customer service approach to child welfare. She has served on the executive committee of the National Association of State Adoption Program Managers (NASAP), most recently serving as committee vice president.

Donna Hornsby, Associate Director
nrc-assocdirector@adoptex.org

Donna Hornsby, L.G.S.W., M.S.W., has more than 19 years of experience in public child welfare.  She has served in the following positions: State child welfare director, National Resource Center staff consultant, National Resource Center independent consultant, U.S. Children's Bureau federal project officer, State office specialist, and caseworker. Her areas of focus have been on workforce development, organizational change, comprehensive family assessment, family engagement, engaging and involving fathers, and building community and state resources.

Ben Hoppin, Project Manager
ben@adoptex.org

Ben Hoppin, M.P.A., has 10 years of experience working in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Seven of those years were spent as a customer service and sales representative at a large sign company. Beginning in 2005, he started a new career as an administrator for The Council on Substance Abuse and Mental Health Recovery and data analyst for the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. After earning his Masters of Public Affairs in 2009, Ben held a position as a part-time grant writer for a family resource center and later joined The Adoption Exchange as project assistant for the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment where he currently serves as a project manager.

Marie Youngpeter, Senior Child Welfare Specialist
myoungpeter@adoptex.org

Marie Youngpeter, a long time child and family advocate, is the senior child welfare specialist for the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids. She has a graduate degree in the field of counseling and more than 30 years of experience in child welfare. Marie retired  from state government after a 29-year career with the Alabama Department of Human Resources. During her career she served  at the county and state levels  as a frontline caseworker in foster care and adoption, a supervisor in child protective services and out of home care, a state policy developer, and a state consultant for systems reform. During the last six years of her career with Alabama, Marie served as the  program manager  for the Office of Permanency overseeing the state foster care, adoption, recruitment and retention, and independent living programs. She joined the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids in February 2012. 

Consultants

Alicia Groh, M.P.P., has more than 14 years of experience in the child welfare field and is the senior consultant for the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids. She has extensive knowledge of adoption and child welfare laws, policies, and funding streams as well as experience leading organizations and strategic change efforts. As an independent consultant and contractor, she has assisted organizations with capacity building, strategic planning, communication planning and implementation, and executive coaching. As executive director of Voice for Adoption, a national advocacy organization that speaks out on behalf of waiting children and adoptive families, she developed and led federal-level advocacy and adoption awareness-building efforts. She has worked as a child welfare policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, developing policy guidance for States on federal child welfare programs. She has also worked on post-adoption support programs and child welfare policy at the North American Council on Adoptable Children.

Rhonda Abban, M.S.W., has 30 years of experience in child welfare with a primary focus on permanency for children. She has held a range of positions, including adoption caseworker, supervisor, and most recently foster care and adoption administrator at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Rhonda has extensive experience with permanency and diligent recruitment measures with the Child and Family Services Review (CSFR), policy development, data analysis, SACWIS implementation, and public-private collaboration. She’s also a licensed independent social worker in Ohio.

Beth Brindo, M.S.S.A., has more than 25 years experience in the field of child welfare with a focus on foster care and adoption. She has more than 12 years of experience as a developer and manager of projects funded by Adoption Opportunities grants from the U.S. Children’s Bureau, with an emphasis on collaboration between the private and public child welfare systems, including rural recruitment, openness in adoption with older children, kinship adoption, minority family recruitment, and non-adversarial interventions with birth parents. She’s written and collaborated on publications about rural adoption and kinship care and adoption. She’s also developed curriculum and conducted training and workshops on rural adoption, kinship care, and adoptive and foster parent recruitment and retention. She’s served as a peer reviewer for the Children's Bureau and is a licensed independent social worker supervisor in Ohio.

Mary Brooks, M.B.A., has more than 20 years of experience working with child welfare agencies to create, implement, and evaluate data-driven recruitment and retention plans. She brings a business and customer service focus to her work in child welfare by using her marketing background to introduce agencies to strategies for targeted marketing and diligent recruitment. Mary brings a personal passion to her work and believes that recruitment and retention of families go hand in hand. She’s presented at various national conferences and worked with agencies on a local, state, and national level.  She is the owner of RESULTS, a marketing consulting firm in Ohio, and has been an AdoptUSKids consultant since its inception.

Eileen Crummy began her 33-year career in New Jersey’s child welfare system as a protective services case worker rising through the ranks to become the agency’s director in 2006. Before retiring from state service, Eileen served as acting commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families where she was responsible for implementation of the state’s child welfare reform efforts. She led a workforce of more than 6,000, focusing them on achieving practice reform. Her efforts resulted in the creation of New Jersey’s first case practice model, a systematic rethinking and reorientation of practice away from compliance towards outcomes with an emphasis on family engagement. Under her leadership, the state set new records for adoptions, reducing the number of legally free waiting children by more than 40 percent. Eileen has extensive experience in organizational diagnostics, adoption program management, public and private adoptive family recruitment and retention, and in developing adoption support programs.

Linda Foster is a program manager and field representative for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services and manages the Interstate Compact on Placement of Children (ICPC) contract for Oklahoma. She developed and implemented the military overseas program and protocol for Oklahoma and provides training to families and staff regarding adoptions with military families.

Deborah Goodman, M.S.W., has been involved in Oklahoma’s public child welfare services for more than 25 years holding various positions such as case worker, supervisor, and administrator. She’s currently the adoption program manager for Oklahoma and has been instrumental in reorganizing the State’s adoption program. She also assisted with the development of the SWIFT Adoption model. Prior to her current position, she coordinated Oklahoma’s One Church, One Child program for 10 years.

Maureen Heffernan, M.S.S.A., is a consultant, trainer, and teacher for parents, social work students, professionals, and organizations. She’s worked for more than 25 years in public and private child welfare settings, having held direct service, supervisory, and management positions.  Her work has focused on permanency planning and adoptions from foster care, with a particular emphasis on permanency for adolescents. She is the co-author of a curriculum and workbook that teach and support effective permanency planning for older youth in foster care. Her expertise includes program design, staff development, and authoring written materials ranging from articles and work plans to training curricula.

Claudia Hutchison, M.A., has had a 20-year career in adoption focused on private-public partnerships. She served as the first program manager of the Oregon Special Needs Adoption Coalition, and subsequently managed the Oregon Post Adoption Resource Center from its inception. She was instrumental in establishing a partnership to develop one of the nation’s first post-graduate programs in adoption for mental health practitioners. Claudia has recently authored publications for national entities such as: the National Child Welfare Resource Center for Adoption’s A Guide to Developing an Adoption Certificate Program for Mental Health Practitioners; AdoptUSKids’ Nuestra Familia, Nuestra Cultura: Promoting and Supporting Latino Families in Adoption and Foster Care; and the Child Welfare Information Gateway’s factsheet series Parenting Your Adopted Child. She currently serves on the national advisory committee for Training and Certifying Adoption Competent Mental Health Practitioners.

Dale Langer is retired from his position as the manager of the adoption and consultation section of Wisconsin's Division of Children and Family Services where served since 2000. In this position, Dale played a key role in the development and implementation of the Wisconsin Special Needs Adoption Initiative, including the implementation of standards for adoption and contracting adoption services in order to increase program capacity. Dale was also instrumental in the implementation of mandatory pre-adoptive family training for all first-time adoptive families and changing Wisconsin’s adoptive home study process based on the Structured Analysis Family Evaluation (SAFE) study model developed by the Consortium for Children. Dale has been an active member and served as vice president of The Association of Administrators of the Interstate Compact on Adoption and Medical Assistance (AAICAMA).

John C. Levesque has 30 years of experience in public child welfare that include roles and responsibilities in state and local program management, supervision of social work staff, and direct practice with children and families. His primary expertise is adoption-related services and supports with experience in the areas of: recruitment and retention of adoptive, foster and kinship families; cultural competence and disproportionality; and timely adoption and permanency planning. He’s also worked in the continuum of public child welfare from staffing a child abuse and neglect hotline to providing direct post-legal adoption services. He’s experienced with the federal Child and Family Services Review (CSFR) and Program Improvement Planning (PIP) processes both from a state and local staff and federal peer reviewer perspective. He co-led an effort to streamline the separate adoptive and foster family training and study process into a unified, comprehensive process. He has extensive experience in providing technical assistance to States on adoption issues and has facilitated stakeholder groups and roundtables involving state program managers.

Penelope (Penny) L. Maza, Ph.D., has worked in the child welfare field for more than 30 years, primarily as a senior staff member and a manager in the federal government. She’s also served as the research director of the Child Welfare League of America. Her primary focus is work designed to facilitate the adoption of children from foster care. Her career has involved a variety of activities related to both adoption and foster care, including research, program evaluation and innovation, quality assurance, and analyses of administrative and other data sources. Not only has her work influenced the operation of state adoption programs, but has also had an impact on and been incorporated into federal legislation. For the past 10 years, she’s analyzed Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) data to inform child welfare policy and practice. As part of that, she’s worked closely with state adoption program managers to interpret findings and identify critical issues to be explored.

Ruth McRoy, M.S.W., Ph.D., is a research professor and the Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor Emerita at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Social Work.  Since 2005, she’s served as a visiting research professor at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. During her 25 years on The University of Texas social work faculty, Ruth served for 12 years as the director of the Center for Social Work Research and the Diversity Institute. Since 2002, Ruth has also served as associate dean for research. She was also a member of the university’s Academy of Distinguished Teaching Professors. A practitioner, researcher, trainer, and lecturer in the field for more than 30 years, her work has focused on such topics as adoptive family recruitment, minority recruitment, barriers to adoption, transracial adoptions, family preservation, kinship care, adoption disproportionality, open adoptions, older child adoptions, and post-adoption services. As part of the AdoptUSKids project and on behalf of the Children’s Bureau, Ruth and her university research team just completed two nationwide studies on barriers to adoption and factors associated with successful special needs adoptions. She is currently leading a research and evaluation team, which is conducting a five-year (2007-12) evaluation of AdoptUSKids services and programs.

Stephanie Pettaway, M.S.W., has more than 30 years experience in social work and child welfare. She is the former director of the Office of Child Welfare Policy and Practice and state adoption program manager for Maryland. She has extensive experience in diligent recruitment, faith-based recruitment, adoption and post-adoption service, and helped to start the One Church, One Family program in Maryland. She has first-hand knowledge and experience with Interstate Compact on Adoption and Medical Assistance (ICAMA), Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), Title IV-B planning, and organizational assessment in Maryland. Prior to coming to AdoptUSKids, she participated in Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSR) in States.

Jackie Pray, Ph.D., A.C.S.W., L.C.S.W., has extensive experience in social work spanning three decades, and includes work in public and private agencies and in higher education. After serving in a variety of social work and university-level faculty positions, she began her own business in 2000. Through Social Work Unlimited, LLC, located in Georgia, Jackie has been involved in several projects, including management of the A Tale of Two States project, an interjurisdictional adoption collaboration between South Carolina and Georgia’s social service agencies, funded by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Adoption Opportunities grant. Her experience includes the provision of child-specific recruitment and family support services related to adoption, curriculum development and training for adoption personnel, preparation of federal and state reports, strategic planning, and overall project management. Jackie also has experience in private agency adoption, post-placement supervision, and resource family preparation training.

Maria L. Quintanilla, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., is the executive director and founder of Latino Family Institute, the first private adoption agency in California specializing in serving the Latino community.  Maria has 20 years of social work experience primarily in the areas of adoption, foster care, kinship care, maternal child health, and most recently working with women affected by substance abuse and HIV/AIDS.  Maria currently oversees two federal grant projects including the Infant Adoption Awareness Program and the Abandoned Infant Assistance Program.  Maria conducts trainings nationally and in Puerto Rico.  She recently co-authored the AdoptUSKids publication Nuestra Familia, Nuestra Cultura:  Promoting and Supporting Latino Families in Adoption and Foster Care. She’s a respected board member of several national boards including the Adoption Exchange  Association and the North American Council of Adoptable Children.

Tracy Scatterday, L.C.S.W., is the associate director at the Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange where she’s responsible for representing the agency in new and existing programs.  For more than eight years, she’s worked to enhance networking and communications on a local, state, and national level to improve adoption services. Her skill areas include the planning and implementation of adoption parties and fairs, child profile writing, group facilitation, and public-private partnerships.  She’s also presented on these topics at national conferences and representing AdoptUSKids through technical assistance.

Phyllis Stevens and her husband Derek are the founders of Together as Adoptive Parents, Inc., a nonprofit, multi-racial adoptive and foster parent group in Pennsylvania. She has conducted trainings and presented locally and nationally on topics such as parent leadership, adoption subsidies (IV-E), post-adoption services, group development, and cultural responsiveness. In addition, Phyllis serves on the board of directors for the North American Council on Adoptable Children, on Pennsylvania's statewide Adoption and Permanency Network advisory board, and is a technical consultant for the National Child Welfare Resource Center for Adoption.

Peggy Taylor, L.M.S.W., has 15 years of experience in direct service and evaluation of services to children and families. Peggy worked in foster care in both public and private child welfare agencies. Her research and evaluation experiences include evidence-based practices for improving performance on federal child welfare outcome measures. Peggy has extensive experience in adapting administrative data (including data bases, case files, existing reports, and focus groups) to support effective, low-cost in-house evaluation program improvement efforts. Additionally, she has experience in helping diverse community groups (including agency directors, staff, advocates, and consumers) use existing outcome performance data and logic model approaches to plan, implement, and evaluate program improvements and new program implementations. Through her experience as the evaluator for Kansas’ Family Centered Systems of Care demonstration grant, Peggy has experience in the implementation and evaluation of the systems of care approach in child welfare services. Peggy also has experience in the planning, evaluation, and development of an innovative, independent child welfare consumer organization, the Kansas Family Advocacy Network.

Sarah Webster, M.S.W., is most familiar with evaluating systems and looking for opportunities to enhance them. She has more than 35 years of social work experience with 27 years in child welfare. She believes all systems have positives to offer and seeks to build upon those positives. She understands both rural and urban issues and how political climates affect systems.  She’s been a child protective services caseworker, supervisor, program director, and regional director before becoming the state director of child protective services for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. She’s a member of the Academy of Certified Social Workers and is a Licensed Master of Social Work—Advanced Practitioner in Texas. She has provided technical assistance on state policy and procedure, Program Improvement Planning (PIP) development, and interjurisdictional policy.

Ada White, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., bridges both the public and private worlds of child welfare with 30 years of experience in the field.  She worked for Louisiana, from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, through foster care, to adoption specialist.  She served as state foster care manager for two years, and later as the state adoption program manager for 11 years.  She was the founder and first president of the National Association of State Adoption Programs.  She served from 2000-07 as the director of adoptions for the Child Welfare League of America, working as a consultant with States and private agencies regarding special needs, infant adoption, rural issues, and international adoption.  She has a broad view of adoption both statewide and nationally with a focus on special needs adoption, rural adoption, and collaboration.