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Board of Directors
Adam Pertman
President
Adam Pertman, President and CEO of NCAP, is one of the leading experts in the U.S. on adoption and child welfare. He previously was President of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, which he built into the pre-eminent research, policy and advocacy think tank in its field. He also was Associate Editor of the scholarly journal Adoption Quarterly and is a widely published author, including of Adoption Nation, which was reviewed as “the most important book every written on the subject.” In a prior career, Pertman was a senior journalist with the Boston Globe, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about adoption. He has delivered hundreds of keynotes, trainings and other presentations internationally. His commentaries have appeared in scores of major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world, and he is interviewed by publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, as well as on national radio and television programs such as “Oprah.” Pertman’s honors include a 2016 Adoption Excellence Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; an Angel in Adoption award from the U.S. Congress; the Special Friend of Children Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and the Dave Thomas Center for Adoption Law’s first award for “the nation’s greatest contributor to public understanding about adoption and permanency placement issues.”
Carol Biddle, MSW
Co-Founder and Executive Director Emerita
Carol Biddle, in addition to serving on NCAP’s Board, is also the organization’s Chief Operating Officer. For over 30 years, she has been a highly respected organizational leader and program development expert in child welfare and children’s mental health. Biddle was the co-founder and served as CEO for 30 years of Kinship Center, a California nonprofit that achieved a national reputation in adoption, fostering-to-permanency, permanency-competent mental health clinics, adoption wraparound, relative caregiver services, and permanency-focused parent and professional training programs.
Under Biddle’s leadership, Kinship Center pioneered advocacy for family-based care and for permanent families. She was an early leader in open adoption practice and LGBT adoption when both ideas were controversial. She was also a pioneer in achieving permanency for developmentally challenged and medically fragile children, as well as in championing siblings being placed together.
Biddle, who has been honored as an Angel in Adoption by the US Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, has a proven track record in creating effective staffs and Boards, including on development and fundraising. She sought a strategic merger of Kinship with a larger organization to ensure succession planning and sustainability of the model programs created under her leadership. In the merged organization, she led the development program and more than doubled donor investment.
Alan Day
Alan Day is a business consultant, humanitarian and antique house enthusiast who lives in Massachusetts. He has a deep interest in issues relating to children and families, which brought him to join the Board of Directors of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency. Before recently retiring, Day was the founder and President of Systems Engineering, Inc. Prior to that successful career, he worked for 15 years in nonprofit organizations that focused on youth prisons, settlement houses, urban Boys Clubs, and as a secondary school administrator.
Day ran SEI for 25 years before selling the firm, which was one of the most successful Microsoft Partner custom software development companies in the country. A primary focus of that firm was the development of case management systems for government health and human services organizations, especially ones requiring the integration of data to enable cooperative and multi-agency collaborative case management. Customers included state, county and city governments across the country. Day and his wife, name, are the parents of two children.
Ruth McRoy
Ruth McRoy is one of the most highly regarded scholars in the field of adoption and child welfare. In September 2009, McRoy became the first holder of the Donahue and DiFelice Endowed Professorship at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. For 25 years prior to moving to BC, she was a faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work, where she held the Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professorship.
McRoy is a practitioner, academician, researcher, and lecturer whose extensive body of work has focused on such topics as culturally competent service delivery, family preservation, open adoptions, post-adoption services, transracial adoptions, and older child adoptions. She has published over 100 articles and 10 books, including: “Transracial and Inracial Adoptees: The Adolescent Years” (with L. Zurcher); “Emotional Disturbance in Adopted Adolescents: Origins and Development” (with H. Grotevant and L. Zurcher); “Special Needs Adoptions: Practice Issues;” and “Openness in Adoption: Family Connections” (with H. Grotevant).
McRoy’s recent honors include: the St. John’s 2010 Outstanding Scholar in Adoption Award; the 2013 Children’s Bureau Adoption Excellence Award; the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Social Work’s 2014 Alumni of the Year Award; and the 2014 Child Advocate of the Year Award from the North American Council on Adoptable Children.
Sonny Ward
Charles (Sonny) Ward is a licensed architect, social activist and humanitarian based in Southern California. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency, he is a former member of the Board of the Family Equality Council, and currently serves on FEC’s Emeritus Board.
Ward founded June Street Architecture in Los Angeles in 2009 and, since then, has served as the firm’s President and Principal. He is also a member of the Woodbury University School of Architecture Board of Advisors and the Woodbury University Architecture of Civic Engagement Advisory Board. Most importantly, he and his husband, Michael Lombardo, are the parents of two amazing children.
Anne Youngblood
Anne Youngblood began her nonprofit career in 1984 with Commuter Transportation Services, which formed some of the nation’s first public/private partnerships between corporations and governments at all levels to reduce congestion through innovative strategies now known as flex-time, job sharing, home offices and tele-commuting. She subsequently served as Executive Director of several of these non-profits in California.
Youngblood later formed a consulting firm, DASH Associates, to work with public and private sector clients, establishing non-profits, developing strategic plans, advising nonprofit Boards, writing and implementing grants and conducting feasibility studies. By 2000, her work transitioned into the child welfare and advocacy arena. She currently is a member of Everychild Foundation, is on the Board of Angel’s Nest Transitional Living Program and is a member of the Los Angeles Funders to End Homelessness.
Everychild consists of 225 women who, through their annual dues, provide a $1 million grant to an L.A. County agency or organization that serves children who suffer from disease, disability, abuse, neglect or poverty. Angel’s Nest is a nonprofit that provides a home for13 young men who aged out of foster care. LA Funders to End Homelessness is a collaborative of large foundations. Youngblood also was a Board member of the Donaldson Adoption Institute.