Karen loves nothing more than helping others improve—at helping others.

For over 25 years in Los Angeles County, Karen’s experience within Child Welfare ranges from social worker to supervisor to managing both child welfare Regional Office and Dependency Court operations. Additionally, she led the DCFS Policy Administration, along with administration in the Training and Risk Management sections. This breadth of knowledge resulted in Karen being ‘loaned’ to the State of California as a managing subject matter expert, on a major child welfare software project, at which she spent nearly five years.

Karen has been called a “unicorn,” as she is a social worker that can decipher County, State and Federal law and regulations or analyze IT processes…then translate and communicate any technical jargon into plain, everyday language. In short, Karen can explain child welfare to lawyers and tech professionals—and technology and the law to child welfare professionals.

As an innovator and leader in Los Angeles County, Karen led the development and implementation of:

• the Los Angeles County DCFS Web-Based Policy site

• the CWS-CARES Snapshot application

• the DCFS/Dependency Court Report Tracking solution

Karen has managed projects through Agile, Waterfall and hybrid approaches, overseeing two separate digital service teams on a CCWIS replacement system. She has worked with teams from 8 to 108, both within California and across the country, being adept at using virtual resources since 2013.

Julie has over 25 years of child welfare experience and her philosophy is that there is no job too big or too small.

She has served as a social worker, social work administrator, community organizer, college instructor, private practitioner and subject matter expert. Recently, Julie served as the Service Manager developing the statewide, web-based Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) Assessment tool, used by Child Welfare in all 58 California counties.

Julie has rolled out county and statewide child welfare initiatives, all while concurrently creating and maintaining office-based food banks and Faith-Based cooperatives for local families in need. She has a knack for building coalitions and leading teams to success.

Julie specializes in analyzing child welfare business processes, finding ways to make these processes efficient and explaining this information in practical, effective ways—to best serve child welfare staff and improve the lives of the families they serve.