Sheryl Brissett Chapman, EdD, LHD, EdM, MSW, ACSW, is the Executive Director of the National Center for Children and Families (NCCF). She is a passionate advocate and internationally recognized Black American expert in child and family welfare. During her 30-year tenure, Dr. Chapman has stewarded NCCF from a small, local orphanage to a nationally accredited organization with a multimillion-dollar annual budget serving more than 50,000 children, youth, and families in the National Capital Region.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Dr. Chapman obtained an MSW from the University of Connecticut as well as doctoral and master’s degrees in education, administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University. She publishes and presents on a wide range of topics, including juvenile justice, systems reform in child and family welfare, poverty and homelessness, childhood trauma, domestic violence, culturally competency, and trauma-informed practice with Black male adolescents removed from their families and placed in public child welfare and juvenile justice systems. As an adjunct associate professor, she taught a year-long family and child welfare course for more than 30 years at the Howard University School of Social Work and contributed to the graduate preparation of more than 800 social workers in the region, teaching at both the master’s and doctoral levels.
 
Dr. Chapman coedited the first Child Welfare Journal to address Black children in the nation’s child welfare systems. Her work continues to garner recognition both internationally and locally. She facilitated the development of the first formal child protection system in the Pacific Basin for the U.S. Department of Public Health and presented on cultural competency at the first national conference on child abuse in Israel. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). She also served on the second Jerry M. Consent Decree Panel for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia; there, her research led to programmatic redesign and deinstitutionalized an outdated system of juvenile services. Recently, Brown Uni¬versity conferred an honorary doctorate of humane letters to Dr. Chapman in recognition of her achievements as an advocate and nonprofit innovator, and her iconic leadership of the 1968 Black Student Walkout, which helped to transform student activism in that era. The university also recognized her with the John Hope Award for Public Service.
 
Dr. Chapman’s investment and continued dedication led to this inquiry into best practices for serving Black male youth in out-of-home care and the development of the following interdisciplinary research team to implement this important endeavor. She affirms essential child welfare ideals that promote cultural representation of governing boards and staff in organizations that serve Black children, youth, and their families throughout a community-based continuum of care.

Ralph Belk, LCSW-C, LICSW, currently serves as NCCF’s Deputy Executive Director, Program Administration. He holds a BSW from Texas Christian University and a MSW from Case Western Reserve University where he was nationally recognized as a Centennial Leader in 2016. He has been a national peer reviewer for the Council on Accreditation (COA), and served as a president of NASW, DC Metro Chapter. Mr. Belk is highly experienced in direct practice, including in mental health counseling; crisis intervention; behavioral health and case management; child welfare; treatment foster care; housing; and support services working with high-risk children, youth, and families in nonprofit, community-based, and school-based settings. He has 25 years’ of expertise providing operational oversight, regulatory and contractual compliance, and leadership to 20 direct service programs through program-level integration, policy development, supervision and training, quality assurance, outcome measurement, and financial management.
 
As a Black man, Mr. Belk possesses special insights in providing mental health and behavioral health services to Black male youth who are experiencing persistent and chronic mental illness and moving them from homelessness to employment, housing, and self-sufficiency. His scholarship and advocacy emphasize the societal and community need to support healthy child and family development and family well-being as well as to ameliorate the negative impact of current social and economic challenges. He facilitates numerous workshops on trauma and the engagement of Black male adolescents at national interdisciplinary conferences, including, but not limited to, the NASW Annual Conference, Council on Social Work Education, and the Institute of Mastery and Integration. A native of Washington, DC, a son, father, godfather, uncle, mentor, brother, and husband, Mr. Belk has also mentored more than 20 Black male youth over the past 25 years, engaging them in middle or high school and supporting their adolescent development as they successfully transitioned into young adulthood as fathers and as husbands.

Jasilyn Morgan, MPH, currently serves as NCCF’s Administrator of Quality Improvement and Contract Compliance. Ms. Morgan has a master’s degree in public health from Indiana University with specializations in cultural competency, applied health research, and human sexuality training. Her research expertise is in sex, gender, and reproduction. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology with concentrations in Black American studies, gender studies, and sociology.
 
Ms. Morgan is a Black woman with more than 20 years of expertise designing culturally tailored interventions, leading large-scale institutional review board research and evaluation studies, and conducting performance quality improvement activities across diverse academic, government, and nonprofit human services environments. An expert in human subject protection, evaluation methodology, and outcome reporting, she conducts needs assessments and engages in advocacy to enhance supports and resources for Black male youth disproportionately affected by intersecting traumas, disparities, and pervasive inequality.
 
Ms. Morgan delivers local and national presentations, prepares publications, facilities training, and shares best practices for serving families plagued by multigenerational poverty. Her extensive direct services experience includes providing trauma-informed services to Black male youth and serving youth with child welfare and juvenile justice involvement who live in out-of-home residential care. In addition, she is an expert in leading educational workshops for and tutoring youth in homeless shelters; conducting outreach and needs assessment research with homeless and unstably housed youth; providing child advocacy and parent engagement support for youth with incarcerated parents; delivering sex education workshops with male youth; facilitating HIV prevention trainings with LGBTQ youth; and providing tailored health education, life skills development, and employment support to young adult survivors of domestic violence and human and sex trafficking. In her current role, Ms. Morgan conducts qualitative and quantitative research utilizing an intersectional analysis and translates complex statistical analysis into relevant, actionable information that fosters program and policy innovation. Her application of social justice framework for research inquiry and intersectional interventions fuels agency-wide decision making and drives performance results that optimize life outcomes for Black male youth and their families.

Krystal Holland, BA, CRCCPA, CEC, currently serves as NCCF’s Training Management and Program Fidelity Administrator and Executive Director, Training Institute. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Maryland–College Park and a certification in executive coaching.
 
A Black woman, Ms. Holland is the first certified and private agency Child Care Program Administrator to serve as a member and then chair of the State of Maryland Board of Residential Child Care Program Professionals, which certifies child and youth care professionals. She currently serves as the program administrator of the agency’s residential programs, serving vulnerable children and youth removed from their families due to abuse, neglect, victimization, and delinquency. She has more than 30 years of administrative, managerial, and direct service experience serving at-risk children, youth, and families and has expertise in youth development, residential childcare, teenage pregnancy prevention and parenting, curriculum development, and training. She also possesses expertise in evaluating program training needs, designing professional development interventions, and implementing executive coaching and training models that grow the talents and abilities of professionals to effectively match the needs of the children and youth in care.
 
Ms. Holland’s training oversight ensures programmatic fidelity, fosters a high-performance workplace culture, and has recently led to the launch of a training institute: a consulting group and training flagship that provides cross-disciplined, practice-focused training and workshops on diverse and cutting-edge topics in human services. She has a special ability to build culturally competent and diverse teams and to enter external organizations with this intent. In 2021, following the publication of a major public exposé on building an antiracist culture, she was recognized by Walt Whitman High School in Maryland, one of the top-performing majority high schools in the nation, for training staff and faculty.