Expertise that strengthens our sector.

Frontline Conditions

Breakout Session: 
Training brains to respond to stress:  Working with kids & parents

Eric Pakulak is the Acting Director of the Brain Development Lab (BDL) at the University of Oregon.  His Ph.D. is in Psychology with an emphasis on cognitive neuroscience, and he also holds degrees in Linguistics and Russian.  His primary research interest is the development, implementation, and assessment of evidence-based training programs that simultaneously target at-risk children and their parents (two-generation approaches).  Related research interests include the neuroplasticity of brain systems important for language and attention and the effects of early adversity on neural organization for these systems.  He explores these questions in both children and adults using techniques to measure brain function and stress physiology. 

​Currently Dr. Pakulak is closely involved in several ongoing lines of research on a two-generation program developed in the BDL, including cultural adaptation, scale-up for broader implementation, and broader assessment of outcomes in both children and parents.   

Breakout Session: 
Improving Behavior, Education, and Health with Screening:  Working with Parents and Kids

Dr. Katherine (Katie) Lingras specializes in social-emotional development in early and middle childhood, with particular emphasis on children experiencing behavioral concerns or who have experienced traumatic events. In addition to outpatient treatment and assessment, Dr. Lingras' body of work is centered on community-based collaboration with pediatric primary care clinics and early childcare programs. Her experience and expertise sits at the intersection of early childhood psychology research, practical applications, and policy implications.

Prior to joining the Psychiatry Department faculty, Dr. Lingras worked as a Psychologist at a community-base non-profit agency in New York City, the New York Center for Child Development, where she provided mental health treatment and consultation, as well as training for providers located in Pediatric Primary Care Clinics, Early Childhood Education (ECE) Centers, Home-based Daycare programs, and mental health clinics. She served as the team lead for a group of mental health professionals who provided professional development training and consultation in ECE centers. During her time in New York, Dr. Lingras held academic appointments at Columbia University Medical College, Weill Cornell Medical College, and hospital appointments with the Family Health Center of Harlem and New York Presbyterian Hospital.
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Dr. Lingras completed her undergraduate and Masters degrees in Psychology at Stanford University and her doctoral work at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Child Development, where she collaborated and published with internationally recognized experts on aggressive behavior, social competence, risk, and resilience in children and families. She completed her clinical psychology internship with the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and her post-doctoral training with Brown University and Bradley Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Breakout Session: 
The Human Dynamics of Helping
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Lehn Benjamin is an Associate Professor in Philanthropic Studies and the Director of the Doctoral Program at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.  She is also an affiliate faculty in the School of Public and Environmental and Affairs at Indiana University-Indianapolis.  She graduated from the University of Minnesota summa cum laude in 1990 and holds a masters and doctorate from Cornell University in Urban and Regional Planning.  Lehn Benjamin’s work has been principally concerned with inequality. She worked in South Africa during the democratic transition, on the Senate Banking Housing and Urban Affairs Committee as a Congressional Fellow, and for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

​Prior to joining the faculty at the school, she spent 10 years on the faculty at George Mason University in the Department of Public and International Affairs, where she taught courses on nonprofit management, public management, and performance measurement. Her research examines issues of accountability and effectiveness in the nonprofit sector. Her current projects explore these issues by looking at the work of frontline staff in human service nonprofits and the experience of the people they serve.

Breakout Session: 
Building Community Support for Young Children with Autism and their Families.
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Sheri Stronach is an Assistant Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities where she teaches courses in multicultural issues and leads the graduate Bilingual and Multicultural Emphasis Program. Her research focuses on the early identification and intervention for young toddlers with autism spectrum disorder, with an emphasis on community engagement, interdisciplinary professional education, and early red flags of autism across cultures. Sheri collaborates closely with the Minnesota Department of Education on the implementation of a State Personnel Development Grant to improve services for families of young children with autism. 

Program Design

Breakout Session:
Getting Dads off the sidelines: Engaging and Enhancing father involvement in families.

Gregory A. Fabiano, Ph.D. is a professor of Counseling, School, and Educational Psychology in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo.  His interests are in the area of evidence-based assessments and treatments for children with ADHD.  He is author or co-author on over 50 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.  Dr. Fabiano’s work has been funded by the Administration for Children and Families, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Education.  In 2007 Dr. Fabiano was nominated by the Department of Education and invited to the White House to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the nation’s highest honor for early career investigators. 

Breakout Session:
Effective service responses for newcomers: Working with immigrants
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Marci Ybarra is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago. Her research examines the relationship between social provisions, including means-tested safety net programs, social insurance, and nonprofit services and families’ socioeconomic well-being. Ybarra considers these outcomes for a diverse set of families in the U.S. including the children of undocumented immigrants, women who have recently given birth, and public program participants.

Ybarra is a member of the Family Self-Sufficiency Research Technical Working Group sponsored by the Administration for Children & Families and the Poverty, Employment, and Self-Sufficiency Network sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and the Administration for Children & Families. She received her doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin and was a Ford Foundation postdoctoral scholar at the University of Michigan.

Breakout Session:
Supporting Maternal Health:  the Experience of the Minnesota Prison Doula project ​

Rebecca Shlafer, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health. Dr. Shlafer joined the faculty in September 2012 after completing a two-year, post-doctoral fellowship in the Division (2010-2012). Dr. Shlafer completed her BS (2004) and MS (2007) in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and her PhD (2010) in Child Psychology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Shlafer's research focuses on understanding the developmental outcomes of children and families with multiple risk factors. She is particularly interested in children with parents in prison, as well as the programs and policies that impact families affected by incarceration. 

​Dr. Shlafer teaches the writing seminar for our interdisciplinary training program in Adolescent Health and routinely teaches undergraduate courses in Child Psychology, as an affiliate faculty member at the Institute of Child Development. In addition to her research and teaching activities, Dr. Shlafer is a volunteer guardian ad litem in Hennepin County where she serves as an advocate for abused and neglected children involved in juvenile court.

Breakout Session: 
The Importance of Quality Implementation for Integrated Models of Human Services Delivery

Dr. Lane Volpe is an anthropologist and the Manager of Strategic Implementation for Boulder County Department of Housing and Human Services (DHHS).  Using her anthropological training and expertise in research translation, she currently directs the Integrated Services Delivery Model of Care for Boulder DHHS, developing and implementing practice models, promoting alignment of policy initiatives and on-the-ground service delivery, and identifying the lived experiences relevant to staff charged with new ways of doing work. Lane brings a unique perspective that helps leaders develop their vision with a level of detail and care needed for that vision to be meaningful for front-line staff, and she works with front-line staff to convey their lived experiences in ways that inform a more functional approach to implementation.  With the current focus on data-driven organizations, Lane finds that what is often needed is not more information but rather more meaning.  In many instances, there is an unseen story governing our work that needs to be observed before a new, higher story can be developed. 
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​Prior to coming to Boulder DHHS, Lane worked as a consultant advising government agencies and non-profits on implementation strategies across diverse service sectors, including early childhood, education, criminal justice, and human services.  Lane is a former doctoral and post-doctoral fellow at the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab at Durham University (Durham, UK) where her research focused on infant sleep, breastfeeding, health-related behavior, and an understanding of the social context within which public health advice is translated and applied. She is also devoted to the field of equine-assisted therapy, and has been involved in developing programming for first responders and other populations dealing with the effects of trauma. Lane holds a doctoral degree in anthropology from Durham University.

Policy & Systems Alignment

Breakout Session: ​
Place, Poverty & Opportunity in America.

Scott W. Allard is the Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington with expertise in poverty and inequality, social welfare policy, and urban policy. Allard is author of Out of Reach: Place, Poverty, and the New American Welfare State (2009, Yale University Press), which examines the spatial and organizational challenges confronting local safety net providers. His latest book Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty in America (2017, Russell Sage Foundation Press), focuses on the changing geography of poverty within metropolitan America and which aspects of the contemporary safety net respond well to these changes. In addition to his appointment at the University of Washington, he is a non-residential senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Breakout Session:
Implications of Material Hardship on Service Delivery
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​Colleen Heflin is a Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs, and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy Research. Dr. Heflin conducts policy-relevant research that sits at the boundaries of sociology, economics, public health, public administration, and women’s studies. The broad aim of her research is to understand the processes that create systems and patterns of social stratification and, more specifically, to examine welfare policy and the well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the causes and consequences of material hardship. In a recent project, Dr. Heflin analyzed how specific shocks to family stability, such as unemployment or becoming disabled, lead to particular kinds of material hardship, such as medical or housing hardship.

Other recent projects have examined how the population using food stamps and unemployment insurance has changed with the Great Recession; how the experience of material hardship affects couples’ decisions to marry; how children’s participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) affects their households’ overall food insecurity; and how veterans’ well-being and social program participation compares to that of other groups.
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Dr. Heflin’s research has appeared in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and the Journal of Policy Analysis & Management. In 2014, her paper on community social capital was awarded the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association. Dr. Heflin’s research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Breakout Session: 
The Effects of a Two-Generation Human Capital Intervention on Low-Income Parent and Their Young Children in Head Start

Teresa Eckrich Sommer is a Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the intersection of policy and practice for economically disadvantaged families and their children. Dr. Sommer specializes in how social programs influence the life course of families, especially through investments in human and social capital. Dr. Sommer is also an evaluation expert and has conducted hundreds of interviews and focus groups with children, families, and program leaders across the country. She has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and Teachers College Record. She has been a featured speaker in a wide range of academic and policy forums, recently including the Aspen Institute’s National 2Gen Practice Institute, the Russell Sage Conference on Anti-Poverty Policy Initiatives in the United States, the Annual National Head Start Conference, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Better Outcomes Through a 2Gen Approach: Federal Agencies Forum.
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​Dr. Sommer’s current work focuses on two-generation human capital programs that simultaneously offer training, education, and career supports to low-income parents combined with high quality early education for their young children. Sommer was featured by National Public Radio in April 2017 as part of her team’s quasi-experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of a two-generation program, CareerAdvance, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sommer received her B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University and her Master and PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Plenary Panel

Raquel Hatter, Ed. D., is deputy director of the Human Services Program at The Kresge Foundation, which supports the advancement of human services organizations to accelerate social and economic mobility for people with low income. She has spent the past 25 years supporting adults, children and families through a variety of roles.
Most recently, Raquel served as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services where she identified ways to improve the outcomes for individuals and families across various support systems including child support, TANF, SNAP and vocational rehabilitation. . Under her guidance, the department adopted a two-generational approach to poverty which addresses the needs of children and parents simultaneously.
Raquel draws on her experiences as both a clinician and an administrator to be a leader and advocate for the human services field. She also brings expertise in public policy, transformational organizational change and management to both her role at Kresge and to the many boards, committees and task forces focused on Human Services on which she serves.
She has received numerous accolades for her work including the 2016 American Public Human Services Association State Member Award for Transforming Human Services and the 2014 Spirit of Crazy Horse Award from Reclaiming Youth International for her service to children, youth and families.
Raquel earned a bachelor of science in clinical community psychology at the University of Michigan, a masters in social work at Eastern Michigan University and earned a doctorate of education in children, youth and family studies from Nova Southeastern University.

Anne Mosle is a vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of Ascend at the Aspen Institute. She is a leading thinker, advocate, and voice in building pathways to opportunity for low-income families and women. With more than 20 years’ experience in policy and philanthropy, Anne has been recognized as Washingtonian of the Year, Ms. Magazine Woman to Watch, and as Visionary Philanthropist. She is also an author of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink.
In her current role at the Aspen Institute, she directs Ascend, the national hub for breakthrough ideas and collaborations that move vulnerable children and their parents towards educational success and economic security. Ascend has been a national leader in catalyzing a two-generation approach to breaking the cycle of poverty. Under Anne’s leadership, Ascend has launched a national values-based fellowship program and is investing $1.5 million in promising programs and policy solutions. In all its work, Ascend engages the voices of families and diverse leaders. In 2014, Ascend plans to launch a new two-generation learning network.
Prior to the Aspen Institute, Anne served as a vice president and officer of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), where she was on the executive team and oversaw $140 million in investments. In addition, Anne led the creation of WKKF’s Family Economic Security portfolio, and managed their civic engagement portfolio and the launch of their mission-driven investing program. Before joining WKKF, she served as the president of the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, spearheading seven years of unprecedented growth. She was also the lead architect of their nationally recognized Stepping Stones initiative to build the financial independence of women and families. Earlier in her career, Anne served as senior vice president at the Center for Policy Alternatives, developing leadership and policy programs for state elected and community leaders. She has organized major summits at The White House and 10 Downing Street as well as numerous state and community forums.
Anne serves on the Advisory Committee of the Oxford University Said School of Business and on the National Trustees Council of America’s Promise. She lives with her family in Washington, DC.

Gloria Perez is one of the country’s leading experts in two-generation strategies to reduce poverty.  As an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute, she is working with leaders from across the country to drive innovative ideas and proven strategies to help families achieve educational success and economic security.  A graduate of Macalester College, Perez is the recipient of  numerous awards, including the Alexandrine Medal from St. Catherine University, an honorary doctorate degree from Macalester College and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.  She serves on the board of directors for Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation,  the Irwin Andrew Porter Foundation, and the board of trustees for the F.R. Bigelow Foundation. 

Tracy Wareing Evans is the President and CEO of the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA), a bi-partisan, non-profit, membership organization representing state and local human service agencies through their top-level leadership. She spearheads the Association’s national Pathways agenda focused on strategically advancing the well-being and health of families and communities. Wareing Evans has a long history in high-level policy development and public administration. She served as a senior advisor to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and, before moving to Washington D.C. in 2009, as the Director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, an integrated human service agency. She has also served as policy adviser for human services under then Arizona Gov. Napolitano and as director of the state’s child welfare division.  Wareing Evans began her career as a litigator. Wareing Evans has served on more than 20 boards and advisory committees over the course of her career, including several national appointments.

Jovon Perry is director of the Economic Assistance and Employment Supports Division in the Children and Family Services administration for the Minnesota Department of Human Services. She oversees economic assistance programs including the Minnesota Family Investment Program, Diversionary Work Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,  Office of Economic Opportunity and resettlement program for refugees. Perry leads her division’s work in promoting the self-sufficiency of families and individuals by delivering high-quality, accessible economic supports for Minnesotans in need.

Previously, Perry worked with NorthPoint Health and Wellness, Inc., Minneapolis, as the Client and Family Services director, overseeing comprehensive client and family service programs impacting community health disparities; and with Pillsbury United Communities, Minneapolis, as the Urban Institute for Service and Learning director and several other roles, providing clients, volunteers and interns growth opportunities in developing skills to implement neighbored social service and community social enterprise.
 
Perry has a Bachelor of Science in Legal Studies from Kaplan University, Iowa, and has certifications in civil mediation and family and divorce mediation. She has also been active in volunteering with Minnesota organizations including Pillsbury United Communities, Hope Academy, Greater Twin Cities United Way and Feed My Starving Children.