Parent Services Project is holding a special symposium in San Francisco this fall to mark our three decades of serving families and communities since Parent Services Project opened its doors. We are very proud to be hosting some wonderful, inspirational speakers who will provide us the opportunity to reflect, learn, share, and envision together the types of family strengthening programs and policies we need in today's ever changing, fast-paced world.
Our Keynote speaker for this event will be commissioner Bryan H. Samuels of the
Administration for
Children, Youth and Families in Washington, DC. Commissioner Samuels will highlight federal
policy trends and opportunities for family strengthening programs. We will also host a panel of state and local
leaders to enhance our mutual learning for the day. For a Save the Date flyer,
Click Here
Tickets are $50 each. To order tickets, you can pay with a credit card through
Pay Pal Using our DONATE link on the left side, or send a check made out to Parent
Services Project and send it to our office.
Registration Form
Scholarships are available (in limited quantity) for low-income Marin
County residents, due to generous support from
First 5 Marin
Children and Families Commission . If you would like to request a scholarship,
contact us by using our online contact form,
or by calling our office directly.
We would be thrilled to have our supporters
sign up as sponsors.
About Commissioner Samuels
Bryan H. Samuels, tapped by President Obama to head the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, has spent his career formulating service delivery innovations and streamlining operations in large government organizations on behalf of children, youth, and families. His commitment to public service is largely motivated by his own success in overcoming great personal hardship during his eleven and half years of growing up in a residential school for disadvantaged children.
Prior to his appointment, Mr. Samuels was Chief of Staff for Chicago Public Schools, where he played a leadership role in managing the day-to-day operations of the third largest school system in the nation with 420,000 students, 623 schools, 44,000 employees, and a $5 billion budget.
From 2003 to 2007, Samuels served as the Director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the nation's third largest child welfare agency. While Director, he moved aggressively to implement comprehensive assessments of all children entering care, redesigned transitional and independent living programs to prepare youth for transitioning to adulthood, created a child location unit to track all runaway youth, and introduced evidence-based services to address the impact of trauma and exposure to violence on children in state care.
As a result of his efforts, DCFS established the lowest caseload ratios for case managers in the nation; reduced the number of youth "on run" by 40 percent and number of days "on run" by 50 percent; decreased the use of residential treatment or group homes by 20 percent; and eliminated the number of past due child protection investigations by 60 percent. Prior to 2003, Samuels taught at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, while also providing technical assistance to state and local governments to improve human service delivery to vulnerable populations.
