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 Linda S. Spears
Vice President
Corporate Communications and Development
Child Welfare League of America
Linda Spears has worked in frontline practice and at the senior management levels in child welfare services for nearly 30 years. She currently serves as Vice President, heading up CWLA's work in policy and public affairs. Central to this work is CWLA's Campaign for a 2010 White House Conference for Children, which will identify and advance the next generation of policy, program, and best practice work to improve outcomes for abused, neglected, and vulnerable children.
Linda recently served as Acting Senior Vice President during CWLA's recent transition and also served as Vice President for Corporate Communications and Development, leading public relations, foundation, corporate, and individual development activities. She previously served as Associate Vice President for Programs, where she provided leadership for CWLA's work in child welfare programs, research, consultation, and training. While at CWLA, Linda has also served as Director of Child Protection and as Senior Child Welfare Consultant, working with numerous state and local jurisdictions to assist them with program and practice evaluation, organizational improvement, agency management, and accountability. She has facilitated communitywide needs assessment, multisystem case analysis, child fatality review, and children's services planning in local and state jurisdictions.
Before joining CWLA in 1992, Linda served as Director of Field Support with the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. As a member of the department's senior leadership team, she oversaw agencywide services in foster care and out-of-home placement, family preservation, child protection, domestic violence, housing, permanency planning and adoption, child care, cultural competence, health care, independent living, and Indian child welfare. During her tenure, she was responsible for developing new solution-oriented foster care service models, several of which gained national attention and ultimately helped to drive increased spending in state foster care programs and resulted in recognition by the National Foster Parent Association and others.
Linda is an enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. She is a member of the board of directors for The Family Violence Prevention Fund, a national organization concerned with violence in the lives of women and children. She has served as an advisor to the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Family Violence program and serves on their Greenbook Policy Advisory Committee. She serves as an advisor to the American Bar Association's Project for Judicial Excellence in Child Abuse and Neglect.
Linda has published several works on domestic violence and child welfare. She served on New York City's Nicholson Review Committee monitoring compliance with court-ordered improvements for battered women and their children in the child protection system. She was awarded the Pioneer Award for her innovative working integrating services to women and children who are victims of violence.
Because of her depth of knowledge and breadth of experience, Linda has emerged as a key national spokesperson on today's core child welfare issues. She has testified before Congress on child protection and family support concerns and has been interviewed numerous times for international, national and local print and broadcast media including Voice of America, Telemundo, TV Gazeta, CNN, NPR, WTTG-TV Fox News, WRC-TV, and KSTP-TV.
For more information, or to schedule an interview with Linda, please contact Joyce Johnson at 804/492-4519 or jjohnson@cwla.org.
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