50 Leading Global Thought Leaders in Child Protection

Introduction

Every system says it exists to protect children. The uncomfortable truth is that many of the systems built with that intention have caused extraordinary harm. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are roughly ten times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than their non-Indigenous peers. In the United States, Black children are disproportionately removed from their families at rates that reflect poverty policing more than evidence-based child protection. Globally, an estimated 5.4 million children live in residential institutions, the vast majority of them not orphans but children whose families simply lacked the support to keep them safe at home. The stakes in this field are unlike almost any other.

Out-of-home care, sometimes called foster care, kinship care, or OOHC depending on where you are in the world, refers to any arrangement in which a child is placed outside their family home by the state due to safety concerns. It includes placements with foster families, relatives and kinship carers, residential group homes, and therapeutic facilities. The global movement toward reforming these systems, replacing institutional care with family-based alternatives, centring the voices of those with lived experience, and investing in prevention and early intervention rather than removal, is one of the most consequential policy conversations happening anywhere in human services right now.

The people on this list are at the centre of that conversation. They are researchers translating decades of longitudinal data into evidence that governments can no longer ignore. They are advocates who aged out of foster care and built organisations to transform the systems that failed them. They are practitioners redesigning how social work teams operate. They are Indigenous leaders fighting for the right of their children to stay connected to culture and community. They are legal reformers challenging the constitutionality of family policing. They are global development specialists closing orphanages and replacing them with family support programs. They represent every discipline the field requires and every geography in which the work is happening.

Two statistics frame everything that follows. The Lancet Psychiatry commission on institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children, published in 2020, synthesised 308 studies from 68 countries involving over 100,000 children and found strong negative associations between institutional care and children's development in every dimension examined. And a 2022 analysis found that one in three children in the United States will be the subject of a child welfare investigation before the age of eighteen. These are not failure statistics for a broken system. They are design characteristics of a system built on surveillance, removal, and institutional response rather than on family support, community capacity, and prevention.

Following the voices on this list will not give you easy answers. This field does not have many. It will give you honest frameworks, rigorous evidence, and the kind of sustained, principled engagement with difficult questions that the scale of the problem demands. I am Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who works with schools, nonprofits, and human service organisations around the world. If you lead a team working in or alongside the child protection sector and want help building the leadership culture and having the difficult conversations that this field requires, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Child Protection Thought Leadership Matters

Child protection is a field where ideas about what works have real consequences for real children. When policy is built on poor evidence, or when ideological commitments override research, children suffer. When promising approaches developed in one context are transplanted without adaptation, they often fail. When the voices of those with lived experience are excluded from the design of systems that will affect millions of children, those systems reproduce the same harms they were intended to prevent.

The field has changed more rapidly in the past decade than in the previous fifty years. The deinstitutionalisation movement has gained genuine global momentum, driven partly by the publication of major research reviews and partly by the political coalition that produced the Global Charter on Children's Care Reform, launched by the United Kingdom government in 2025 and now endorsed by dozens of nations. The Family First Prevention Services Act in the United States, passed in 2018 and progressively implemented since, has fundamentally shifted federal funding priorities from placement toward prevention, generating natural experiments that researchers are now beginning to evaluate. In Australia, the Closing the Gap National Agreement has made reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care a formal government accountability target, and the 2025 Family Matters Report documented both the urgency and the solution pathway.

Following thought leaders in this space offers something that reading policy documents and government reports alone cannot. It provides the intellectual context that makes sense of those documents, the critical distance to evaluate their claims, the practitioner knowledge to assess their implementation challenges, and the moral clarity to know when well-intentioned systems are still causing harm. The cost of not following these voices is not just ignorance. It is the perpetuation of avoidable harm to some of the world's most vulnerable children.

If your team works in child protection, community services, family welfare, social work, or any adjacent sector, Jonno White delivers keynotes and workshops that help leadership teams translate the thinking of voices like these into decisions and conversations on Monday morning. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

This list identifies fifty thought leaders whose work is genuinely shaping the field of child protection and out-of-home care globally. The selection prioritised geographic and disciplinary diversity, focusing on voices from Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Disciplines represented include social work, developmental psychology, public health, family law, Indigenous studies, lived experience advocacy, international development, social policy, and child rights. The methodology applied standards of genuine contribution to the field: original research, policy reform leadership, direct practice innovation, or advocacy grounded in credentialled expertise and authentic engagement with the communities these voices seek to serve.

This list deliberately moved past the most frequently cited household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, including emerging researchers, mid-career practitioners, and advocates from regions and traditions that mainstream thought leadership lists routinely underrepresent. Geographic diversity targets ensured no single country dominates, and disciplinary representation spans every dimension of the field from neuroscience and developmental psychology to legal reform and Indigenous self-determination.

Category One: Lived Experience and System Transformation

These leaders have experienced child protection or out-of-home care directly and have built their careers on transforming the systems that shaped their lives. They bring a perspective that research alone cannot provide, and their influence on policy and practice has been profound. The movement to centre lived experience in the design of child welfare systems is among the most important shifts in the field over the past decade, and the voices below have been instrumental in driving it.

1. Sixto Cancel

The founder and CEO of Think of Us entered the US foster care system at eleven months old and aged out of care without ever being placed with family, despite having aunts and uncles who had been foster parents for longer than he had been alive. That experience of a system failing to explore family options when they existed sits at the centre of his advocacy. Think of Us, which Cancel founded in 2014, functions as a research and design lab using data, technology, and the perspectives of people with lived experience to drive reform at the federal, state, and local levels.

The organisation raised over fifty million dollars through the TED Audacious Project to accelerate its work on kinship care, prevention, and youth transitions. In January 2026, Cancel received a formal resolution from the South Carolina Senate recognising his service leading the South Carolina Department of Social Services. His TED talk on kinship care, delivered in Vancouver in 2023, remains one of the clearest short explanations of why the system separates children from families who could care for them, and why fixing that requires redesigning the system's defaults rather than simply improving its intentions.

2. Isaiah Dawe

An Aboriginal Australian man of Butchulla and Garawa heritage, Isaiah Dawe is the founder and CEO of ID. Know Yourself, the first Aboriginal-led organisation delivering one-on-one mentoring to Aboriginal children aged seven to sixteen in the out-of-home care and juvenile justice systems in New South Wales. His own experience of out-of-home care included being sent a text message at seventeen by his foster carer saying he could no longer live there, and sitting his Higher School Certificate while working out where he would sleep. That experience became the genesis for a mentoring model that focuses on identity, belonging, and breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma.

Now recognised as essential community infrastructure in Greater Sydney, the ID. Know Yourself model has been validated through consistent outcomes for Aboriginal young people who would otherwise have cycled between care and the justice system. Dawe has delivered over five hundred keynote presentations nationally and internationally through Saxton Speakers and Keynote Entertainment, and his leadership of the TAFE NSW Aboriginal Advisory Council demonstrates the reach of his influence beyond the child welfare sector. His contribution is rooted in the conviction that Aboriginal children need Aboriginal mentors who understand their specific experience.

3. Imogen Edeson

As CEO of CREATE Foundation, Australia's national consumer body representing the voices of children and young people with an out-of-home care experience, Imogen Edeson leads the organisation that has done more than any other to centre care-experienced young people's voices in Australian child protection policy. CREATE's annual report on out-of-home care, based on surveys of hundreds of young people currently in care, provides some of the most reliable and consistent longitudinal data available on how children experience the system from the inside.

Under Edeson's leadership, CREATE has played a central role in submitting to the Queensland Child Safety Commission of Inquiry in 2025, bringing to government the confronting finding that children in care fear speaking up because they fear consequences without follow-through. In February 2026, CREATE marked the tenth year of World Care Day, a global initiative connecting care-experienced young people across nine countries. Edeson's specific contribution is ensuring that the systemic insights emerging from CREATE's lived experience work are translated into policy recommendations that governments can act on.

4. Shereen White

As the founder of Pause UK, Shereen White created one of the most distinctive and influential organisations in British child protection by focusing on a group that the system routinely fails: mothers who have had multiple children removed from their care. Pause works with women in intensive, relationship-based two-year programs that support them to make changes to their lives and break the cycle of repeated pregnancies followed by further removals. The model has achieved significant reductions in further pregnancies and removals among participants and has been evaluated positively across multiple independent assessments.

White's own lived experience as a woman who had children removed shapes the Pause model's design from the ground up, and her advocacy for the rights and humanity of mothers within the child welfare system challenges a narrative that tends to position birth parents primarily as risks to be managed. The expansion of Pause across England and Scotland and its influence on international discussions about how child welfare systems should engage with birth families reflects the strength of White's founding insight and the quality of the evidence Pause has generated.

5. Hayley Bridwell

As CEO of the Mockingbird Society in Seattle, Hayley Bridwell leads one of the most innovative foster care reform organisations in the United States. The Mockingbird Family model, developed by the Society over two decades, restructures foster care delivery around extended-family-like networks in which a constellation of foster families is organised around a central hub home, creating the kind of sustained community support and peer connection that isolated foster families almost never have access to. Evaluations of the model have shown improvements in placement stability and foster carer retention.

The model has been replicated across multiple states and presented at the CWLA 2024 national conference as a replicable framework for systems change, with participants examining how the Mockingbird approach of emulating extended-family networks challenges the traditional single-family placement model that has characterised foster care since its inception. Bridwell's leadership has focused on translating the evidence base behind Mockingbird into implementation guidance that state child welfare agencies can use without losing the relational quality that makes the model work.

6. Deborah Daro

A research fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and one of the world's most experienced researchers in child abuse prevention, Deborah Daro has spent four decades building and evaluating the evidence base for prevention programs designed to keep children safe before maltreatment occurs. Her work spans home visiting programs, parent education models, community-level prevention strategies, and the implementation science that determines whether evidence-based programs retain their effectiveness when scaled across diverse contexts and populations.

Daro's approach to prevention has been shaped by a recognition that neither universal nor targeted programs alone are sufficient: the field requires a layered strategy that combines broad community support with intensive services for families at highest risk. Her contribution to the theoretical foundations of the prevention field, including her collaborative work on the concept of "prevention science" as a discipline that integrates research, practice, and policy, has influenced how dozens of countries have organised their child protection prevention systems over the past two decades.

Category Two: Indigenous Child Advocacy and Self-Determination

The over-representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States is not an accident. It is the direct consequence of colonial policies, racialised child removal practices, and chronic underfunding of community-controlled services. The leaders in this category are working to reverse these patterns through advocacy, research, and the building of Indigenous-led institutions. Their work represents some of the most politically courageous and practically grounded contributions to the field anywhere in the world.

7. Catherine Liddle

An Arrernte and Luritja woman from Central Australia, Catherine Liddle is the CEO of SNAICC, the national peak body representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families in Australia. The 2025 Family Matters Report, which SNAICC produces annually, documented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children make up 45 percent of those in out-of-home care in Australia while representing only 5 percent of the child population, and that less than 6 percent of funding goes to the community-controlled organisations best placed to support them.

Liddle's public advocacy has focused on redirecting that investment, and in April 2026 she was central to the launch of SNAICC's Sector Transformation Principles Framework, which calls on mainstream out-of-home care providers to genuinely partner with Aboriginal organisations rather than simply consulting them. Her appearances on ABC Q+A and in national media have brought the evidence on Indigenous children in care to audiences far beyond the sector, and her policy engagement with both state and federal governments has been sustained across multiple election cycles and policy environments.

8. Cindy Blackstock

A Gitxsan woman and Professor at McGill University, Cindy Blackstock has spent her career fighting one of the most important legal cases in Canadian history: a complaint filed in 2007 alleging that Canada discriminates against First Nations children by chronically underfunding child welfare on reserves relative to services available to non-Indigenous children. The case, pursued through the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal over nearly fifteen years, resulted in a landmark ruling requiring Canada to overhaul its approach to First Nations child welfare funding.

Blackstock is also the Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, which develops resources, campaigns, and policy positions centred on the best interests of First Nations children. The case was the subject of the 2016 documentary We Can't Make the Same Mistake Twice, directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Her work represents the intersection of legal advocacy, community accountability, and rigorous analysis of how good intentions fail when not backed by equitable funding, and her ongoing engagement with the CHRT settlement process in 2025 and 2026 continues to shape Canadian child welfare law.

9. Muriel Bamblett

As Chair of SNAICC and CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, Muriel Bamblett is one of Australia's most senior Aboriginal leaders in the child and family welfare sector. VACCA is one of the oldest and largest Aboriginal community-controlled organisations in Victoria, delivering culturally grounded services for Aboriginal children and families that the broader out-of-home care system cannot replicate. Its sustained provision of these services has made it a model for how genuine self-determination operates in practice rather than in policy documents.

Bamblett has been a consistent advocate for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle, which requires that when Aboriginal children must be placed in out-of-home care, active efforts are made to place them with Aboriginal family, then community, before non-Aboriginal carers. Her evidence that this principle is routinely applied inadequately, with less than half of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care placed with Aboriginal carers, has been central to the national reform agenda. She has spoken at national and international conferences about what genuine self-determination in child protection requires structurally, not just rhetorically.

10. Paul Gray

An Associate Professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, Paul Gray serves as Co-Chair of the Family Matters Leadership Group, the advocacy coalition driving the campaign to end the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care. His academic work examines the intersection of First Nations standpoint theory, decolonising research methodologies, and child protection policy in ways that challenge the field to account for its own settler-colonial foundations.

Gray's 2026 review, published in the journal Genealogy, analysed the structural and historical factors contributing to the over-representation of First Nations children in New South Wales out-of-home care, drawing on a relational First Nations Standpoint Theory and decolonising research paradigm that provides a more complete account of the problem than structural explanations alone. His ability to move between academic research and national advocacy leadership makes him an unusual and valuable voice, grounding the urgency of the numbers in a theoretical framework that explains not just what is happening but why it persists.

11. Phillip Brooks

As CEO of the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak, Phillip Brooks is the leading advocacy voice for Aboriginal child protection practice in Queensland. His work spans policy advocacy, regulatory consultation, and direct engagement with government on the conditions that enable Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to deliver genuinely effective child protection services. His LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 provide some of the most detailed and practically oriented commentary available on the intersection of NDIS reform, child protection systems, and Aboriginal self-determination.

In 2026, Brooks was actively engaged in the National Child Safety Reform Consultation, which addressed supervision practices, transparency, and regulatory responses across early childhood education and care settings. His perspective consistently bridges the regulatory and community dimensions of child protection in ways that are essential for anyone trying to understand how reform translates into changed practice at a Queensland and national level, and his contributions to the NDIS Reform Advisory Committee reflect the breadth of his institutional engagement.

12. Darcy Cavanagh

An Aboriginal woman and Co-Founder and Director of REFOCUS Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Service, Darcy Cavanagh built the organisation she wished had existed when she was young. REFOCUS delivers culturally centred, holistic mentoring and therapeutic services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in out-of-home care and the justice system, grounding its practice in Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing frameworks and the principle that genuine healing requires cultural connection, not just clinical intervention.

Cavanagh presented the REFOCUS model at SNAICC's 2025 webinar on reunification and stronger families, sharing how the service integrates cultural supervision, cultural immersion programs, and psychological expertise in ways that mainstream services cannot replicate. Her work represents a grassroots response to the systemic failure to meet the needs of Aboriginal children in care, built from lived understanding of what those children need rather than institutional design informed by external expertise. The REFOCUS model is increasingly cited by other organisations as evidence of what culturally grounded therapeutic care looks like in practice.

Category Three: Researchers Shaping the Evidence Base

These researchers have produced the studies, longitudinal data, and evidence syntheses that governments, courts, and practitioners rely on when making decisions about child protection policy and practice. Their work does not always make headlines, but it shapes everything. The shift from intuition-based to evidence-informed child welfare practice over the past three decades is largely the product of the sustained research efforts of people like those listed here.

13. Mark E. Courtney

A Professor at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, Mark Courtney is one of the most influential researchers in the world on the long-term outcomes of young people who leave foster care. The Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth, which he led over two decades, produced the most comprehensive longitudinal data available on what happens to young people after they age out of care in the United States, documenting rates of homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, and mental illness that directly shaped federal policy on extended foster care.

His book Climbing a Broken Ladder, co-authored with Nathaniel Okpych, provides the most comprehensive evidence available on foster youth in higher education and has become the standard reference for institutions and advocates working to improve access and completion rates. His engagement with policymakers at the federal and state level over more than two decades has made him one of the most practically influential child welfare researchers of his generation. His 2026 partnership with Youth Villages and Child Trends on research summarising policies that improve outcomes for young people leaving care continues this tradition of translating longitudinal research into actionable guidance.

14. Marinus van IJzendoorn

A Visiting Professor at UCL and Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Marinus van IJzendoorn co-led the Lancet Commission on Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation of Children, which synthesised 308 studies from 68 countries involving over 100,000 children and produced the most authoritative scientific statement available on the harms of institutional care and the benefits of family-based alternatives. The 2020 Lancet Psychiatry paper, co-authored with Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, and colleagues, found strong negative associations between institutional care and children's development across all dimensions examined.

Van IJzendoorn's decades of meta-analytic research on attachment theory and child development have generated the foundational evidence that underpins current understanding of why children need consistent, nurturing family care during sensitive developmental periods. His work on the cross-national applicability of attachment measures and the universality of attachment theory has been particularly important for care reform advocates in Global South contexts. A 2025 book chapter from Oxford Academic on the history of attachment research and its bearing on care practice demonstrates his continued engagement with the translation of developmental science into reform argument.

15. Edmund Sonuga-Barke

As Chair of the Lancet Commission on Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation, Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke of King's College London brought together twenty-two of the world's leading experts to produce the most comprehensive policy guidance on care reform available. His own research on the English and Romanian Adoptee project, which has tracked the developmental trajectories of children adopted from Romanian institutions into UK families since the early 1990s, has provided some of the most compelling long-term evidence on both the harms of early institutional care and the remarkable capacity for recovery following placement in nurturing families.

The Commission's fourteen policy recommendations, addressed to policymakers at every level from local service planners to international donors, have been incorporated into reform frameworks across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Sonuga-Barke continues to contribute to discussions about how the neuroscience of early adversity can inform the timing and nature of care reform, and his engagement with clinical and policy audiences has made the Commission's findings accessible to practitioners who would not otherwise engage with peer-reviewed psychiatric literature.

16. Leah Bromfield

A Professor at the University of South Australia, Leah Bromfield is one of Australia's leading child maltreatment researchers, with a particular focus on understanding the pathways through which children encounter the child protection system and the factors that shape their outcomes. Her work on mandatory reporting, early identification of maltreatment risk, and the interactions between family support services and statutory child protection has made her a central voice in Australian policy discussions about how to redesign child welfare systems that currently spend most of their resources on investigation and removal.

Her research on pre-birth and early childhood involvement with child protection systems, which documents alarming rates of system contact in the first five years of life in New South Wales and South Australia, has pointed toward the intervention window most likely to change developmental trajectories. A co-authored 2025 paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examining developmental vulnerability at age five among children with child protection contacts, directly informs prevention investment decisions. Bromfield communicates her findings accessibly, making her one of the most practically useful researchers in the Australian sector.

17. Marit Skivenes

A Professor at the University of Bergen and one of the leading international scholars on comparative child protection systems, Marit Skivenes has spent her career examining how different countries make child protection decisions, what values drive those decisions, and how different systems balance the rights of children against the rights of parents. Her comparative research across Nordic countries, the United Kingdom, and beyond has produced some of the most valuable insights available into why child protection systems that appear similar on paper produce radically different outcomes in practice.

Her work on decision-making in child removal cases has been particularly influential, documenting how professional discretion, organisational culture, and legal frameworks interact in ways that research and policy rarely account for. Her participation in international research collaborations including the Child Welfare Removals by the State project, which compared removal rates and practices across multiple countries, has generated comparative evidence that national reformers can use to challenge assumptions about what is normal, necessary, or inevitable in child protection practice.

18. Franziska Meinck

A Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and an editor of the journal Child Protection and Practice, Franziska Meinck is one of the world's most active researchers in the measurement of child maltreatment and its determinants globally. Her work spans sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and it focuses specifically on the methodological challenges of measuring violence against children in ways that are comparable across cultures and contexts. The 2026 International Conference on 21st Century Child Abuse, which she is involved in organising, will produce a global research agenda for technology-facilitated child abuse.

Meinck's commitment to evidence generation in low and middle income countries, where child protection systems are often weakest and the need for data most acute, makes her a genuinely global voice in a field that can be inadvertently dominated by high-income country perspectives. Her work on violence against children in sub-Saharan Africa, including research on the specific vulnerabilities created by poverty, HIV, and weak social protection systems, has generated evidence that challenges the assumption that family-based care is universally safe without adequate family support.

19. John Fluke

Based at the Kempe Center at the University of Colorado and a founding editor of the journal Child Protection and Practice, John Fluke has spent his career improving the quality of data and measurement in child protection research. His work addresses how maltreatment data is collected, what the existing data can and cannot tell us about the problem, and how decision-making in child protection cases can be studied and improved. The Kempe Center, named after C. Henry Kempe who first documented the battered child syndrome in 1962, remains one of the world's premier institutions for child maltreatment research and intervention.

Fluke's editorial leadership of Child Protection and Practice, now the official journal of the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, has helped create a publication that explicitly bridges academic research and frontline practice. His work on racial and ethnic disparities in child welfare decision-making has been particularly important in US contexts, documenting how assessment tools and professional discretion interact to produce racially inequitable outcomes even when individual practitioners hold no conscious bias.

20. Delphine Collin-Vezina

A Professor at McGill University's School of Social Work and a leading researcher in trauma-informed care for children who have experienced maltreatment and out-of-home placement, Delphine Collin-Vezina bridges research and practice in unusually direct ways. Her work produces tools and frameworks that clinical practitioners can apply while also building the evidence base that justifies investment in trauma-informed approaches at the system level. Her research on the specific needs of children in residential care and the outcomes associated with different placement types has influenced both Canadian federal policy and international conversations about quality care.

Her contributions to the development of trauma-informed assessment frameworks for child welfare settings, including the Trauma Affect Regulation Guide for Education and Therapy adapted for child welfare contexts, reflect a commitment to ensuring that frontline practitioners have the tools they need to recognise and respond to the traumatic presentations that are almost universal among children in care. Her work on implementation science, examining what organisational conditions enable trauma-informed approaches to be sustained rather than adopted and abandoned, has become increasingly influential as the field grapples with the gap between principle and practice.

21. Nathaniel Okpych

An Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut's School of Social Work, Nathaniel Okpych focuses on educational and economic outcomes for young people in and transitioning from foster care. His research addresses one of the most concrete and consequential gaps in the American child welfare system: the radically lower rates of higher education completion among care-experienced young people compared to their peers, and the specific policy and practice conditions that close that gap.

His book Climbing a Broken Ladder, co-authored with Mark Courtney, provides the most comprehensive evidence available on foster youth in college and has become the standard reference for institutions and advocates working to improve higher education access and outcomes for this population. In 2026, he contributed to a research summary with Youth Villages and Child Trends on the policies that shape outcomes for young people leaving foster care, a collaboration that demonstrates his commitment to translating research into the kind of practical guidance that system leaders can use.

22. Jonathan Shemmings

A Professor at the University of Kent and one of the UK's leading researchers on disorganised attachment and its implications for child protection assessment, Jonathan Shemmings has spent his career building the evidence base for practitioner assessment tools that help social workers identify the specific attachment and parenting patterns associated with elevated risk of maltreatment. His work on the Signs of Safety approach and on the assessment of parental capacity through a developmental attachment lens has been widely applied across English local authority children's services.

His books on parent-child attachment in the context of child protection, including Disorganised Attachment and Early Life Trauma in Children and co-authored texts on assessing disorganised attachment in children, have become standard references for qualified social workers seeking to apply attachment theory to child protection assessments in a way that is both theoretically rigorous and practically applicable. His engagement with practice development through workshops and training programs gives his research unusually direct reach into frontline practice.

Category Four: Policy Architects and Legal Reformers

Child protection policy is shaped not only by evidence but by law, advocacy, and political will. The people in this category are working at the intersection of law, policy, and advocacy to change the rules that govern how children and families are treated. Their contributions include landmark litigation, federal legislative advocacy, constitutional challenges to family policing, and the development of policy frameworks that have reshaped how governments think about their obligations to families at risk.

23. Dorothy Roberts

A Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families, published in 2022, Dorothy Roberts has done more than almost any other scholar to document the structural racism embedded in the American child welfare system. Her argument, grounded in decades of research, is that the child welfare system functions primarily as a mechanism of surveillance and family policing that falls disproportionately on poor Black families, and that genuine reform requires not just improved services but a fundamental reimagining of how society supports children.

Torn Apart generated significant debate within the field, including from practitioners who believed it underweighted genuine child safety concerns, and that debate itself reflects Roberts' most important contribution: she forced the field to confront questions it had been avoiding about whose children are removed, for what reasons, and who benefits from the removal. Her previous book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, published in 2002, was the first major scholarly examination of racial disparities in the American child welfare system and laid the groundwork for twenty years of research on race and child welfare that her 2022 book synthesises.

24. Alan Dettlaff

As the Dean of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston and a leading scholar on racial equity in child welfare, Alan Dettlaff has spent his career documenting the racial disparities embedded in the American child welfare system and developing frameworks for addressing them. His research on racial disproportionality and disparity has been among the most methodologically rigorous and practically influential in the field, contributing to how state child welfare agencies measure and respond to racially inequitable outcomes.

His more recent engagement with child welfare abolition as an intellectual and advocacy position has placed him at the centre of one of the most contested debates in the field, arguing that the harm the child welfare system causes to Black families is so systematic and so deeply rooted in its structure that reform alone is insufficient. His willingness to engage this argument seriously, while remaining engaged with the practical question of what comes next for families who need support, reflects the intellectual honesty that makes his contribution distinctive within the field.

25. Vivek Sankaran

A Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Vivek Sankaran focuses on the legal representation of children and parents in child welfare proceedings. His work addresses one of the most persistent structural failures in American child protection: the routine denial of effective legal counsel to parents facing the removal of their children, which produces proceedings that are formally legal but substantively unfair. His advocacy for guaranteed representation for parents in child protection cases has influenced policy reforms in multiple states.

His research on the outcomes associated with family representation in child welfare proceedings has provided the evidence base for legislative change, demonstrating that when parents have effective counsel, children spend less time in foster care and are more likely to be reunified safely with their families. He engages regularly on LinkedIn with legal, policy, and practice audiences, making complex constitutional and procedural arguments accessible to practitioners who need to understand why legal reform matters to outcomes for the children they serve.

26. Josh Gupta-Kagan

A Professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar of family law and child welfare, Josh Gupta-Kagan focuses on the constitutional and statutory frameworks that govern family separation and the legal reforms that could reduce unnecessary removal. His recent work on the "reasonable efforts" requirement in American child welfare law, which is supposed to ensure that services are provided to families before removal but is widely acknowledged to be inadequately enforced, has contributed to national conversations about where the legal levers for prevention actually sit.

His engagement with the abolitionist perspective in child welfare has been notably measured, taking seriously the concerns about family policing while also examining the practical implications of different reform pathways for children currently in dangerous situations. This ability to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely gives his contributions a usefulness beyond the advocacy positions that dominate much public debate on child welfare reform, and his work is regularly cited by reformers working across the ideological spectrum.

27. Jennifer Rodriguez

The Executive Director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, Jennifer Rodriguez leads one of the oldest and most respected child welfare law organisations in the United States. The Youth Law Center has been litigating on behalf of children in foster care since 1978, producing landmark cases that have reshaped how California and federal law treat the legal rights of children in the child welfare system. Rodriguez's specific focus on the rights of system-involved youth, including their rights to education, healthcare, independent living preparation, and meaningful participation in decisions about their own lives, reflects a commitment to children as rights-holders rather than subjects of protection.

Her work includes direct litigation, policy advocacy before state and federal legislatures, and capacity building for child welfare law practitioners across the country. Her leadership of the Youth Law Center at a time of significant federal policy uncertainty about child welfare funding and oversight has required both legal skill and political acumen, and her consistent focus on the practical rights of young people in care has kept the organisation's work grounded in what matters most to those it serves.

28. Miriam Mack

As Associate Director of the National Center for Youth Law, Miriam Mack works on the intersection of child welfare, education, and juvenile justice, focusing on the legal and systemic changes needed to improve outcomes for young people involved in multiple public systems simultaneously. Her work on the school discipline pipeline, the relationship between foster care placement instability and educational disruption, and the legal tools available to advocates working to improve educational outcomes for system-involved youth has made her an important voice in conversations about cross-system reform.

The National Center for Youth Law's recent work on the rights of youth in immigration and child welfare contexts has placed Mack at the forefront of the field's engagement with the specific vulnerabilities of immigrant and undocumented children within child protection systems. Her contributions to the development of legal frameworks that treat immigrant families with children in the child welfare system with the same due process protections afforded to others reflects the Centre's commitment to equity across all dimensions of child welfare law.

29. Krista Thomas

As a senior policy leader at First Focus Campaign for Children, a bipartisan advocacy organisation dedicated to making children and families a priority in federal policy and budget decisions, Krista Thomas has been one of the most consistent and credible voices for child welfare in Washington. Her work focuses on federal child welfare funding, implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act, and the policy conditions that would allow state child welfare agencies to genuinely shift from removal-focused to prevention-focused service delivery.

Her engagement with the specific budgetary mechanisms that determine how federal child welfare dollars flow, including the intricate funding rules that have historically incentivised placement over prevention, has given her advocacy a technical depth that is rare in child welfare policy circles. Her regular commentary on federal budget proposals and their implications for children and families makes her LinkedIn presence one of the most reliable sources for real-time analysis of how federal policy changes will affect children in and at risk of out-of-home care.

30. Carolyne Willow

The founding director of Article 39, a UK charity working to secure children's rights in institutions, Carolyne Willow directed the organisation for a decade until early 2025 and is now a barrister specialising in family and public law while continuing in a part-time advisory role with Article 39. The organisation she built focuses specifically on the rights of children in residential care, children's homes, and boarding schools, using litigation and advocacy to enforce standards that protect children from the abuse that has been systematically documented in independent inquiries.

Under her leadership, Article 39 won a significant information rights tribunal case in 2023 that forced the Department for Education to release a report documenting dozens of incidents where children in care had died or suffered serious harm. In February 2025, Article 39 successfully appealed a High Court judgment to establish that local authorities cannot give valid consent to deprive children in care of their liberty without court authorisation. Her book Children Behind Bars, published in 2015, remains an important reference for anyone seeking to understand the legal dimensions of children's rights in institutional settings.

Category Five: Practitioners and Service Leaders

These are the people building and running the systems that serve children and families. Their insights come from the ground level and carry a different authority from research or advocacy, the authority of direct responsibility for what happens to children. Their contributions to the field include not just service delivery but thought leadership that shapes how the broader sector thinks about practice, quality, and the conditions that allow good work to occur.

31. Isabelle Trowler

As Chief Social Worker for Children and Families in England since 2013, Isabelle Trowler CBE has been the most influential single practitioner voice in UK child protection for over a decade. She co-founded the Reclaiming Social Work model in the London Borough of Hackney, now widely known as the Hackney model, which restructured children's social care teams around clinical units combining social workers, systemic practitioners, and child practitioners in ways that changed how decisions were made and how families were engaged. The model was central to Eileen Munro's review of child protection in England.

Trowler's March 2026 blog post for Social Work Week reflected on a year of significant progress in reforming children's social care, including the creation of new family help and multi-agency child protection teams and the development of new post-qualification standards for social workers. Her address to Social Work Week 2025 highlighted the racial inequity in social work leadership and called for systemic action on the underrepresentation of Black and minority ethnic social workers in senior positions, reflecting a sustained commitment to equity alongside practice excellence.

32. Andy Elvin

As CEO of TACT Fostering and Adoption, one of the UK's largest and most influential independent foster care and adoption charities, Andy Elvin is one of the most practically knowledgeable voices on what foster care looks like from inside a service provider. TACT is the UK's largest specialist charity provider of fostering and adoption services, and Elvin's leadership has focused on developing its evidence base, strengthening its support for foster families, and contributing to national debates about what quality looks like in independent fostering agencies.

His public commentary on the role of commercial providers in foster care, the adequacy of placement support, and the systemic factors that drive placement breakdown has made him one of the most quoted practitioners in UK child welfare media. His LinkedIn posts provide regular commentary on Children's Commissioner reports, policy consultations, and practice developments that give sector professionals an accessible synthesis of what is happening and why it matters. He was a founding board member of Frontline Social Work, the fast-track social work training programme, demonstrating his commitment to workforce development beyond his own organisation.

33. Charlotte Ramsden

As Strategic Director of Children's Services at Salford City Council and a former Vice President of the Association of Directors of Children's Services in England, Charlotte Ramsden leads one of the most consistently high-performing local authority children's services departments in northern England. Her specific contributions to the national conversation on children's services include work on early intervention, the relationship between poverty and child protection demand, and the conditions that allow social workers to practise well rather than just process cases within high-caseload environments.

She speaks with the authority of someone who has sustained high-quality provision under genuine resource pressure across multiple political cycles, and her LinkedIn presence reflects a commitment to sharing what works for practitioners and leaders trying to do the same. Her work on restorative practice approaches to family engagement, which positions families as partners in assessment rather than subjects of investigation, has influenced how other local authorities approach the front end of their child protection systems.

34. Joe Tucci

As CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, Joe Tucci is one of Australia's most prominent advocates for trauma-informed responses to child maltreatment. The Australian Childhood Foundation has been at the forefront of developing and disseminating therapeutic approaches that recognise the neurological and psychological impacts of early adversity on children's development, and Tucci has been central to building the evidence base and the practitioner capability needed to deliver those approaches at scale across a diverse national sector.

His regular written contributions to the sector on topics ranging from childhood trauma and the brain to workforce wellbeing and organisational culture make him one of the most widely followed practitioners in the Australian child protection community. He approaches practice development as a cultural challenge as much as a technical one, arguing that trauma-informed service delivery requires organisations to understand and respond to the trauma that practitioners themselves carry, not just the trauma of the children they serve. His model of "sanctuary" as an organisational property, not just a service type, has influenced many Australian OOHC providers.

35. Robyn Miller

A Senior Lecturer at Monash University and one of Australia's most experienced practitioners in therapeutic approaches to child protection and out-of-home care, Robyn Miller has spent her career developing and implementing models of practice that address the specific therapeutic needs of children in care. Her work has focused particularly on what children in out-of-home care need emotionally and relationally to develop well, and on the implications of that understanding for how carers are recruited, trained, and supported.

She has been a consistent voice for the needs of children with complex developmental histories, arguing that the system's tendency to respond to challenging behaviour with placement disruption is itself a form of harm that replicates the relational ruptures children have already experienced. Her training work with foster carers and residential care workers has focused on building the reflective capacity that allows carers to remain regulated and responsive when children's behaviour is most difficult, grounding practice development in attachment theory and developmental trauma frameworks.

36. Dame Carol Homden

As CEO of Coram since 2007 and made Dame Commander of the British Empire in the New Year Honours 2026 for services to children and families, Dame Carol Homden leads one of the UK's most diverse and historically important children's charities. Coram, which traces its origins to the Foundling Hospital established in 1739, now operates as a group of specialist organisations spanning adoption, family law services, early childhood education, advocacy, arts therapy, and research, making it one of the most comprehensively child-focused institutions in Britain.

Under her leadership, Coram has developed the Coram Institute for Children, awarded independent research organisation status by UKRI in November 2025, which positions it as a "think and do" centre dedicated to advancing the life chances of children through the translation of research into policy and practice. Her seventeen years of leadership have seen Coram navigate significant changes in the adoption and fostering landscape in England, and her sustained commitment to children's rights as the organising principle of institutional strategy has shaped the culture of one of the UK's most influential children's sector organisations.

37. Denise Burns

As CEO of the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare in Victoria, Denise Burns leads the peak body representing community service organisations delivering child and family services across Victoria, Australia. The Centre provides policy leadership, workforce development, research engagement, and advocacy for the Victorian community services sector, and under Burns' leadership it has become a significant voice on the funding, workforce, and governance conditions that enable or undermine quality service delivery to vulnerable children and families.

In April 2026, Burns welcomed the Victorian Government's refreshed ministry arrangements affecting child and family welfare, reflecting the Centre's sustained engagement with state government policy processes. Her consistent focus on the workforce dimensions of child protection, including the secondary trauma, supervision practices, and organisational conditions that determine whether skilled workers stay in the sector, addresses a dimension of system quality that policy discussions focused on structures and processes too often overlook.

Category Six: Global Care Reform and Deinstitutionalisation

Five million children globally live in institutions. The movement to close those institutions and build family-based care systems is one of the most significant humanitarian efforts of the twenty-first century. These leaders are driving that effort across multiple continents, building the evidence base, the political will, and the practical frameworks that make deinstitutionalisation achievable. Their work spans advocacy, technical assistance, research, and the convening of global networks needed to accelerate change.

38. Victoria Olarte

Based at Hope and Homes for Children, one of the world's leading organisations working to end the institutionalisation of children globally, Victoria Olarte has spent her career working with governments, civil society, and communities in multiple countries to design and implement transitions from residential care to family-based alternatives. Her LinkedIn posts offer some of the most practically grounded commentary available on what deinstitutionalisation actually requires on the ground, from individual case management for children transitioning out of institutions to the political economy of closing facilities with powerful institutional stakeholders.

Hope and Homes for Children played a central role in the development of the Global Charter on Children's Care Reform, launched by the UK government in September 2025 and endorsed by dozens of nations. Olarte's contribution to the international knowledge base on transition planning, including the Roadmap for National Care Reform she co-developed with colleagues, provides governments with practical step-by-step guidance for transitioning from institutional to family-based systems in ways that keep children safe and supported throughout the process.

39. Kiran Modi

The founder of Udayan Care, a New Delhi-based organisation providing family-based care, educational support, and advocacy for children who have experienced institutional care in India, and one of the founders of the Biennial International Conference on Alternative Care for Children in Asia, Kiran Modi is one of the most influential voices in the Asian care reform movement. At the 2025 BICON conference in Malaysia, the first to be held in Southeast Asia, she brought together over 130 delegates from 25 countries to advance the regional conversation on care reform.

Her work at Udayan Care demonstrates that high-quality family-based care is achievable in Indian contexts, challenging the assumption held by some that cultural and economic conditions in South Asia make deinstitutionalisation impractical. Her advocacy on the harms of orphanage tourism and voluntourism has been particularly important in a region where these phenomena remain significant, generating demand for residential care placements that would otherwise not exist. The programme of research and practice documentation she has built through BICON has created a genuine knowledge base for Asian care reform.

40. Rebecca Nhep

The Senior Technical Advisor at the Better Care Network and a co-founder of Kinnected, an initiative of ACC International Relief, Rebecca Nhep is one of the most practically knowledgeable voices on care reform implementation in the Asia-Pacific region. Her work involves providing technical assistance to organisations and governments transitioning children out of residential care and building family-based alternatives, and her 2025 research with Hannah Won on the impact of child sponsorship programs on residential care transitions represented a significant contribution to the evidence base on one of the most contested questions in international development and child welfare.

The Better Care Network, which she represents, functions as the global knowledge hub for care reform, aggregating and disseminating the research, case studies, and tools that practitioners and policymakers need to design and implement transitions. Nhep's December 2025 webinar on children's identity documentation and care reform, co-hosted with the UK FCDO, demonstrated the breadth of her engagement with the practical and rights-based dimensions of deinstitutionalisation that extend well beyond placement decisions.

41. Matt Haarhoff

As a senior program director at Family for Every Child, the global network of over sixty child protection organisations working in more than fifty countries to develop and share child-centred, family-based approaches to care and protection, Matt Haarhoff is one of the most connected practitioners in the international child protection sector. Family for Every Child's unusual model positions local civil society organisations in the Global South as genuine strategy developers rather than recipients of Northern technical assistance, reflecting a commitment to self-determination that is increasingly recognised as essential for sustainable care reform.

Haarhoff's LinkedIn presence shares perspectives from the network's member organisations across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere that rarely appear in mainstream child protection discourse. His contribution to thinking about how civil society organisations in different national and cultural contexts can become genuine agents of care reform, rather than implementing imported models, addresses one of the most underexplored questions in the global deinstitutionalisation movement.

42. Ana Beltran

As the Director of the Grandfamilies and Kinship Support Network, a national technical assistance centre supporting grandfamilies and other kinship families in the United States, Ana Beltran is one of the country's foremost experts on kinship care policy and practice. Her decades of work at Generations United, before moving to the Grandfamilies Network, produced the most comprehensive and consistently updated resources available on state and federal kinship care policy, making her a reference point for advocates, policymakers, and practitioners working to improve outcomes for children placed with relatives.

Kinship care is now the placement type most associated with positive outcomes for children who cannot live with their parents, and Beltran's contribution to building the policy and practice infrastructure that makes kinship care viable, including family finding, licensing support, financial assistance, and caregiver training, has been central to the American child welfare system's increasing orientation toward family-based alternatives over the past two decades. Her April 2026 participation in the APHSA webinar on A Home for Every Child alongside colleagues from Think of Us and the Dave Thomas Foundation demonstrates her ongoing engagement at the highest levels of federal child welfare policy.

43. Rita Soronen

As President and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, which focuses specifically on finding permanent, loving families for the more than 140,000 children in foster care who are waiting to be adopted in the United States, Rita Soronen leads one of the most focused and consistently effective child welfare advocacy organisations in the country. The Foundation's Wendy's Wonderful Kids program, which funds dedicated adoption recruiters focused exclusively on finding families for older youth, youth with disabilities, and sibling groups, has been independently evaluated and found to significantly improve adoption outcomes for the children it serves.

Soronen's long-term leadership of the Foundation has built it into a nationally recognised authority on adoption from foster care, with policy influence that extends from federal legislation to state-level practice reform. Her engagement with the national conversation on permanency, including the specific challenges of ensuring that children who cannot return to birth families find permanent family connections rather than aging out of care without them, represents a sustained commitment to the most durable form of child protection: a family who will never stop being your family.

44. Jeannie Papadopoulos

As a senior research fellow at Child Family Community Australia, the national resource centre for the child and family welfare sector housed within the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Jeannie Papadopoulos is one of the most productive and practically oriented evidence synthesisers in the Australian child protection sector. Her work produces accessible summaries of the research evidence on topics ranging from sibling placement in out-of-home care to the outcomes of different therapeutic approaches for children in residential care.

CFCA's evidence summaries and practice guides are among the most widely used resources in the Australian child protection sector, translated into practice guidance by state government departments, OOHC providers, and training organisations across the country. Papadopoulos' contributions to the sector's understanding of what evidence says about quality care for children in out-of-home care, presented in accessible formats that practitioners without research training can use directly, represent a form of knowledge translation that is essential but often invisible in lists of field leaders.

Category Seven: Critical Perspectives and Social Justice

The child welfare field is not a monolith. Some of its most important voices are those who challenge consensus, surface uncomfortable evidence, and insist that the field account for its harms as well as its intentions. The people in this category work at the intersection of research, advocacy, and critical theory to push the field toward greater honesty about who it serves and who it fails.

45. Brid Featherstone

A Professor at the University of Huddersfield and one of the most consistently challenging voices in UK child protection research, Brid Featherstone has spent her career arguing that the child protection system's focus on individual parenting failures systematically obscures the structural conditions, poverty, housing insecurity, domestic violence, mental health, that actually drive the harms it is designed to address. Her book Re-imagining Child Protection, co-authored with Sue White and Kate Morris, has been one of the most influential critical texts in the UK field and has shaped a generation of social workers' thinking about the limits of risk-focused practice.

Her recent work on family support and early help, particularly the social model of child protection that she and her colleagues have developed, offers an evidence-based alternative to the forensic investigation model that has dominated UK child protection for three decades. This approach, which emphasises relational and community-based support as the primary response to children and families in difficulty, has influenced local authority practice reform in a number of English councils and contributed to the national policy shift toward family help that the current UK government has embraced.

46. Helen Buckley

A Professor Emerita at Trinity College Dublin and one of Ireland's most distinguished child protection researchers, Helen Buckley has spent her career examining how child protection systems make decisions, what influences those decisions, and how the gap between policy intent and practice reality develops. Her longitudinal research on the implementation of child protection reforms in Ireland, which has followed specific cases and systems through multiple cycles of inquiry and reform, has produced some of the most insightful accounts available of why child protection systems are so resistant to improvement.

Her book The Crafting of the Child Protection System, drawing on ethnographic research within Irish child protection services, remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand how frontline professionals navigate the gap between official guidance and organisational reality. Her contributions to the Irish child welfare reform process following a series of high-profile inquiry reports have combined respect for the complexity of frontline work with clear-eyed analysis of the systemic conditions that produce poor outcomes.

47. Patricia Fronek

An Associate Professor at Griffith University and a prominent voice in Australian and international social work ethics, Patricia Fronek brings a critical perspective to child protection that encompasses ethics, human rights, and the professional dimensions of social work in statutory settings. Her work on the ethical dimensions of social work practice in child protection, including the tensions between statutory authority and therapeutic relationship, has contributed to how Australian social work education prepares students for the specific ethical challenges of child welfare work.

Her engagement with international social work ethics through publications and conference contributions has also placed Australian child welfare perspectives in conversation with global discussions about how social work should respond when state power and family rights collide. Her LinkedIn posts address practice, policy, and ethical dimensions of social work with a rigour and accessibility that makes her a valued voice for practitioners seeking to think clearly about difficult situations rather than just comply with procedure.

48. Charmaine Williams

A Professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and a researcher whose work focuses on the experiences of Black families in the Canadian child welfare system, Charmaine Williams has been at the forefront of Canadian academic and policy engagement with race and child welfare. Her research examines how anti-Black racism shapes the over-representation of Black children and families in the Canadian child welfare system, and what structural and practice changes would produce more equitable outcomes.

Her work on the specific experiences of Black mothers in the child welfare system, examining how stereotypes about Black mothering interact with child protection assessment to produce racially inequitable removal decisions, has contributed to both the academic literature and the practice development work of Ontario child welfare agencies that are seeking to reduce racial disparities. Her engagement with the anti-oppressive practice tradition in Canadian social work provides a theoretical framework that practitioners seeking to address racial inequity in their own work can draw on directly.

Category Eight: Kinship Care, Prevention, and Sector Development

The transformation of child protection from a reactive, removal-focused system to a proactive, prevention-focused one requires not just new policies but new institutions, new data, and new frameworks for understanding what success looks like. The people in this final category are building those institutions, generating that data, and developing the frameworks that will define child welfare practice for the next generation.

49. Zach Laris

As the founder and president of Child Welfare Wonk, a policy analysis and communications platform focused on the US child welfare system, Zach Laris has built one of the most valuable knowledge translation resources in American child welfare. His regular newsletters and LinkedIn posts synthesise research, policy developments, and practice evidence in ways that make complex information accessible to the practitioners, advocates, and policymakers who need to act on it but often lack time to engage directly with the academic literature.

In January 2026, Laris facilitated a significant conversation with ACF's Assistant Secretary Alex Adams about the A Home for Every Child initiative, helping translate federal policy intentions into the kind of specific, actionable guidance that state child welfare agencies can use. His January 2026 research roundup, which synthesised findings on multidimensional treatment foster care, foster parent involvement in case planning, and the long-term consequences of childhood maltreatment for emotional regulation, demonstrated the breadth and quality of the curation he provides to the sector.

50. Maria Herczog

A Hungarian academic, policy expert, and former President of Eurochild, the European network of organisations working for children's rights across Europe, Maria Herczog has spent decades working on child protection systems reform across Central and Eastern Europe. She has served on the Council of Europe's Expert Group on children's rights and contributed to the development of European care reform frameworks at a time when post-communist countries were transitioning away from systems built entirely around residential institutional care.

Her comparative knowledge of how different European countries have approached the transition from institutional to family-based care, including the specific obstacles that large residential institutions with powerful stakeholders have created in different national contexts, makes her perspective unusually valuable for understanding the political economy of care reform. Her contribution to documenting and disseminating the lessons from the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian deinstitutionalisation processes has provided guidance that other countries undertaking similar transitions can learn from directly.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered but ultimately did not make the final fifty. Eileen Munro, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and the author of the landmark Munro Review of Child Protection in England in 2011, remains one of the most influential thinkers in the field, though her main contributions were primarily in the period preceding this list's research window. Neil Thompson has contributed substantially to anti-discriminatory practice in social work, though his focus has broadened beyond child protection specifically.

Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, and other well-known leadership voices would appear on most lists touching on human services and organisational leadership. Their work has shaped the broader field, and their contributions to understanding vulnerability, trust, and purpose are foundational. This list deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, whose specific contributions to child protection and out-of-home care are more directly applicable to the questions this field faces. Their absence from the numbered list is an editorial choice, not a judgment about the value of their work.

Robert McCall, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, and Nathan Fox contributed significantly to the Lancet Commission on Institutionalisation and made the list of serious candidates. Their contributions are captured in the entries on their Lancet Commission co-leads. Several Australian researchers including Philip Mendes at Monash University, whose work on extended care policy mapping was published in 2025, and Jacqui Hendriks at AIFS were also considered and remain worth following for those specifically interested in Australian care leaver research.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Child Protection Thought Leadership

The first and most consequential mistake is treating the research on deinstitutionalisation as a simple instruction to close all residential care immediately, regardless of whether the family-based alternatives are in place to receive the children who would be displaced. The evidence against institutional care is powerful and unambiguous, but it does not follow that rapid unplanned closure is better for children than sustained investment in building the family support infrastructure that makes deinstitutionalisation safe. Several countries that have moved quickly without this infrastructure have created new harms in the process.

The second mistake is assuming that kinship care is always preferable to other placement types without accounting for the specific circumstances of the child or the capacity of the kin carer. The evidence shows that kinship care is, on average, associated with better outcomes than non-kin foster care, but that average obscures significant variation. Children placed with kin carers who lack adequate support, resources, and training can experience outcomes as poor as those in unsupported non-kin placements.

The third mistake is treating the lived experience perspective as a uniform consensus rather than a diverse set of voices with different experiences and different conclusions. People who have been through the child protection system hold the most direct and irreplaceable knowledge about what it is like to be a child within it, but they do not all agree about what should change or how. Centring lived experience is essential; treating it as a monolith that can substitute for evidence-based policy analysis is its own form of disrespect.

The fourth mistake is conflating family preservation with child safety, assuming that keeping families together is always in a child's best interests. The evidence clearly shows that children who are safely maintained in their families with appropriate support have better outcomes than those who are unnecessarily removed. It does not show that removal is never necessary. Any framework that fails to hold both of these truths simultaneously is dangerous in practice.

The fifth mistake is following only voices from one country or one tradition as if child welfare knowledge is nationally bounded. The specific challenges of child protection in Australia differ from those in the United States, which differ from those in Ethiopia, which differ from those in Norway. Each national system has something to teach every other national system, and restricting your reading to your own jurisdiction leaves you unable to challenge your most comfortable assumptions.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Child Protection Reading and Following Practice

Start with the voices in the lived experience category. The most important shift in child welfare over the past decade has been the recognition that the people who have been through the system hold irreplaceable knowledge about how it actually functions versus how it is designed to function. Following Sixto Cancel, Isaiah Dawe, Imogen Edeson, and Shereen White will give you the moral and experiential grounding to evaluate everything else you read about the field.

Then build your evidence foundation. The Lancet Commission papers on institutionalisation are available open access and should be read in full by anyone working in or influencing the design of care systems. Mark Courtney and Nathaniel Okpych's Climbing a Broken Ladder is the essential text on foster youth in higher education. Dorothy Roberts' Torn Apart is essential for understanding the structural racism critique of American child welfare. These are not optional reading. They are the foundations on which contemporary field knowledge rests.

Build geographic diversity into your following practice deliberately. If you work in Australia, make sure you are also following UK and US voices. If you work in the US, follow the global deinstitutionalisation movement through the Better Care Network, Hope and Homes for Children, and Family for Every Child. The problems each system faces are different, but the insights each system generates are often transferable to contexts the original researchers never considered.

Prioritise voices who engage with evidence they disagree with. The child welfare field has significant ideological fault lines, particularly around the abolitionist argument, the evidence for family preservation versus child safety, and the appropriate role of residential care for children with complex needs. The most valuable thought leaders are those who engage seriously with the strongest version of views they do not hold, rather than those who only articulate the case for their own position.

Finally, bring the ideas into your team's conversations. Child protection organisations are, at their best, learning organisations that use research and external perspectives to improve their own practice. If you lead a team in this sector and want help facilitating the kinds of conversations that turn reading into practice, email jonno@consultclarity.org. I work with leadership teams in health, education, and human services organisations to build the team culture and communication skills that allow difficult but necessary conversations to happen productively.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is out-of-home care, and how does it differ from foster care?

Out-of-home care is the term used in Australia and some other countries for any arrangement where a child is placed outside their family home by the state due to safety concerns. It includes foster care placements with non-relative families, kinship care placements with relatives or other people with existing relationships to the child, residential group homes, and therapeutic care facilities. Foster care is often used as the broader term in the United Kingdom and United States. The terms overlap but are not identical, and the specific structures, funding arrangements, and legal frameworks vary significantly between countries and jurisdictions.

Why are Indigenous children so dramatically over-represented in out-of-home care in Australia and Canada?

The over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australian out-of-home care and of First Nations children in Canadian child welfare reflects a direct and documented legacy of colonial policies that were explicitly designed to separate Indigenous children from their families, cultures, and communities. These include the Stolen Generations policies in Australia and the residential school system in Canada. The contemporary over-representation is not a new phenomenon but a continuation of this history, compounded by chronic underfunding of community-controlled services, inadequate implementation of Indigenous placement principles, and child protection systems designed around assumptions about family structure and parenting that pathologise different cultural practices.

How was this list compiled?

The list was compiled through a systematic review of academic research, sector publications, policy documentation, and advocacy outputs across all major world regions. The selection criteria prioritised geographic and disciplinary diversity, genuine contribution to the field rather than name recognition, and representation of the full spectrum of disciplines involved in child protection, from neuroscience and developmental psychology to legal reform and lived experience advocacy. The list deliberately moved past the most frequently cited household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

What is the difference between family preservation and the abolitionist approach to child welfare?

Family preservation refers to services and approaches designed to support families at risk of child removal so that children can safely remain at home. The abolitionist approach, associated with scholars including Dorothy Roberts and Alan Dettlaff, argues that the child welfare system in the United States is so deeply embedded in racial and economic surveillance of poor Black families that reform is insufficient and the system should be fundamentally dismantled. Most practitioners occupy positions between these poles, supporting significant reform while maintaining that child protection systems have a legitimate function in responding to genuine maltreatment.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership workshops or keynote sessions on the people and leadership challenges facing organisations in the child protection sector?

Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams in human services, community sector, and child and family welfare organisations on the leadership and communication challenges that determine whether these organisations can deliver on their mission. He facilitates executive team workshops, leadership offsites, and keynotes that help sector leaders have the difficult conversations, build the team cultures, and develop the decision-making clarity that the work demands. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What are the most important recent developments in global child protection policy?

The most significant recent developments include the UK government's Global Charter on Children's Care Reform launched in 2025, now endorsed by dozens of countries, which commits governments to transitioning away from institutional care toward family-based alternatives. In Australia, the 2025 Family Matters Report documented the continued over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care and called for urgent investment in community-controlled organisations. In the United States, the progressive implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act since 2018 has shifted federal funding toward prevention, generating early data on outcomes. The 2026 CWLA National Conference in Washington brought together field leaders to examine how lived experience can be genuinely embedded in every level of decision-making.

Final Thoughts

The fifty people on this list share a conviction that the current child welfare system in most of the world's wealthy countries is not the best we can do for vulnerable children and their families. Some arrive at that conviction through research. Some arrive through advocacy. Some arrive through their own experience as children in care. Some arrive through decades of frontline work watching systems fail the families they were built to serve.

What they share, across all those different routes to the same conclusion, is a commitment to evidence, specificity, and honesty about what works and what does not. The field does not need more people who agree that children deserve better. It needs people who can specify what better looks like, build the evidence base that justifies the investment required to achieve it, and create the political conditions for change in systems that are deeply resistant to it.

For leaders of organisations working in or alongside this sector, the question is not whether to engage with these ideas but how to engage with them productively within the specific context of your team, your organisation, your sector, and your jurisdiction. The gap between knowing what the research says and changing how your team operates is where most reform efforts stall, and closing that gap requires a different kind of leadership than the one that produced the current system.

If you lead a school, nonprofit, healthcare organisation, or community services provider working with children and families and you want help building the leadership culture and having the difficult conversations that this work demands, I am Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in more than 150 countries. Many organisations find that international travel to engage me is far more affordable than they expect. Whether virtual or face to face, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the mental health dimensions that intersect with child protection work, including the secondary trauma that practitioners in this field carry and the team cultures that sustain people through it, see the blog post "35 Best Thought Leaders Globally on Mental Health" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mental-health.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session for your leadership team in the child and family welfare sector, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

35 Best Thought Leaders Globally on Mental Health

The conversation about mental health has never been louder. It has also never been more important to know whose voice to trust. The World Health Organization estimates that one in four people worldwide will experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives, and the global economic burden of mental disorders has surpassed USD $2.5 trillion annually. In workplaces alone, the WHO calculates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy approximately USD $1 trillion per year.

The mental health field needs more than awareness. It needs implementation. Understanding what the research says is a starting point. Translating it into how teams are led, how cultures are built, and how difficult conversations are navigated is where real change happens.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mental-health