Author: Linda Wollesen, Brad Richardson
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Brookes Publishing Company
Published: 06/27/2024
Pages: 184
ISBN: 9781681255828
2nd Edition

About the Author

Linda Wollesen focused her career on public health nursing and collaborative community-based services to low-income and ethnically diverse families. She worked as a nursing visitor in housing projects in East Los Angeles, nursing supervisor in Santa Clara, and program manager in Santa Cruz County, all in California. Her clinical expertise included services and care coordination for children and infants who have special needs or who are in foster care. She also supervised a research replication site for the David Olds Nurse-Family Partnership in Monterey County.

Ms. Wollesen was the developer of the Life Skills Progression(TM) (LSP) instrument and pioneered the reliability and content work for the tool with the support of a fellowship from ZERO TO THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. She founded the Life Skill Outcomes, LLC, which provides LSP training and best practice consultation and developed an LSP database for use by programs using the LSP.

Dr. Richardson is a Research Scientist and Adjunct Associate Professor at The University of Iowa School of Social Work where he serves as co‐director of the Consortium for Substance Abuse Research and Evaluation and Research Director of the UI National Resource Center for Family Centered Practice, promoting culturally responsive family centered services through research and evaluation, technical assistance, training and information dissemination. Dr. Richardson is also Director of the Center for Public Health Evaluation and Research, Disproportionate Minority Contact [DMC] Resource Center Coordinator. In 2018, he established the Life Skills Progression National Center at the University of Iowa Des Moines campus.

Dr. Richardson has developed valid and reliable instruments that assist practitioners in measuring progress to first, show those with whom they are working the successes they are having which they can build upon, and second, use aggregate results for the dual purpose of measuring outcomes for other interested stakeholders (e.g., demonstrating outcomes to funders, managers, administrators), and for inform program staff of the results being achieved in order to improve program and client outcomes. This work brings together career expertise in research and practice. Using a family centered, strengths‐based and culturally responsive frame of reference, Dr. Richardson has conducted well over a hundred evaluations of early childhood, child welfare, juvenile justice, public health, education, justice system, mental health, and substance use disorder projects. He has written extensively on racial and ethnic disparities and what are now referred to as social determinants of health to help improve service systems including chronic disease, cancer and aging. He has served as National DMC Coordinator on the board of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice testifying before the National Academies in the development of their Developmental Approach to Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare publication and served as two‐time Chair of the American Public Health Association's Cancer Forum.

Joanne Martin, DrPH, M.S., FAAN, is the founding director of The MOM Project and the former director of HFA Indiana Training & Technical Assistance Project.