Staff

Ruth White, MSSA
Executive Director

Ms. White is one of the nation’s leading experts on the nexus between housing policy and child welfare. She is the former Director of Housing and Homelessness for the Child Welfare League of America. In that capacity she co-edited the landmark issue of the League’s journal, Child Welfare, documenting the extent to which children are needlessly held in foster care because their parents lack decent housing. She coordinated conferences, site visits, advisory committees and wrote a newsletter to inform the field of promising practices in the Family Unification Program, which provides federal housing vouchers to families and youth aging out of foster care.

White has a Master of Science Degree in Social Administration from Case Western Reserve University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Work from Ohio State University. She is a member of the National Association of Social Workers and Women in Housing Finance. White is currently a Furfey Scholar at the National Catholic School of Social Service at Catholic University of America doctoral program in social work.

Consultants

Robert McKay

Robert McKay is widely regarded as the architect of Family Unification Program, HUD’s Section 8 program which matches families and youth in the child welfare system with housing subsidies in order to prevent homelessness and promote family preservation. Mr. McKay is the founder of two major public housing associations, Citizens Housing and Planning Association (1967) and the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (1979). Mr. McKay’s work at CHAPA and CLPHA resulted in the construction, preservation, and rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units nationwide. With over forty years of successful work to create safe, decent, and affordable housing for low-income families, Mr. McKay was the obvious choice to oversee the implementation of the ground-breaking Family Unification Program (FUP) in 1990. Mr. McKay was selected as the first Director of Housing and Homelessness for the Child Welfare League of America and in that capacity, worked for over a decade to bring together more than 330 child welfare-housing partnerships nationwide. As a result of Mr. McKay’s remarkable ability to help individuals in these two diverse systems find common ground, over 40,000 housing subsidies have been coupled with supportive services to enable more than 200,000 children to return home safely or avoid foster care placement altogether.

In 2000, through his contact with advocates and CWLA’s Youth Advisory Committee, Mr. McKay learned that youth aging out of foster care could benefit from access to HUD’s Family Unification Program. In response, Mr. McKay reached out to Sen. Bond’s office and within months, in October 2000, Congress added youth as an eligible population for FUP.

In May 2008, Mr. McKay co-founded the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare in an effort to create the structure necessary to bring his efforts to scale. Mr. McKay will train others create partnerships to ensure that children no longer needlessly enter and remain in foster care as a consequence of their family’s inability to afford safe, decent, affordable housing. In the capacity of Senior Consultant, Mr. McKay will also lend his considerable skills and talents to help child welfare agencies tap housing resources on behalf of young people who face adulthood without the assistance of a permanent family.

John Cheney Egan

Robin Nixon