Joan Wallace-Benjamin, PhD '80
A Voice for Children
Since the dawn of the child welfare system, people have been asking, “How do we really know we are helping children?” “We know from kids who come back to visit us how things turned out, but anecdotal evidence is not enough” says Heller-trained Joan Wallace-Benjamin, PhD ’80, CEO of New England’s largest private nonprofit child and family service agency, The Home for Little Wanderers.
Recently Wallace-Benjamin launched a new department for performance and outcomes to answer more rigorously the questions she feels must be addressed. To that end, she is developing an evaluation process to determine how “her kids” are doing. From a position of knowing what works, The Home can then create programs that will achieve positive outcomes and ensure the healthy development of at-risk children.
Helping communities
Except for a brief foray into the executive search business, which she confesses was “for profit envy,” Wallace-Benjamin has focused her career on helping people and communities, especially children. Her career began as deputy director of Head Start for Action for Boston’s Community Development (ABCD). Following that she accepted a position of director of operations for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, where she helped shift the focus from recreation to youth development.
Wallace-Benjamin has been successful redirecting the focus of organizations to create broader change at a policy level and has used her leadership to improve the lives of children. “Thinking of something happening to a child still keeps me up at night,” she says. “The work we do at The Home can turn a kid around. This is often their last stop.” She won’t give up on kids.
The Home
The Home provides services to over 10,000 children and families annually through 20 programs focusing on prevention, advocacy, research and direct care. Only months after becoming president and CEO, Wallace-Benjamin completed a merger with Parents’ and Children’s Services, expanding the age of children whom The Home serves to include zero- to five-year-olds and broadening services to include prevention services as well as treatment and residential care.
Today The Home employs nearly 800 people and has a budget of $46 million. The Home is listed as number 12 on the Boston Business Journal’s list of top 25 nonprofits --“after the arts, birds and dogs,” comments Wallace-Benjamin. The Home is the only human services agency in the top 15 on that list.
Embracing challenge
Wallace-Benjamin has always been an innovator but, at the same time, has remained committed to research. While completing her dissertation work on the attitudes and expectations of African American women toward their mentally retarded children, she developed a unique way to measure an individual’s dependence on social services based on social class, a dependency scale that is still used today.
At one point in her career, Wallace-Benjamin took over the struggling Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. Putting into action her understanding that people invest in people, she built networks in the Boston community and was able to raise enough money to grow the budget from $250,000 to $3.5 million in her11 years as president. Wallace-Benjamin also led the effort to purchase and renovate a new building in Dudley Square and transformed the Urban League into a visible and viable presence in Boston.
Wallace-Benjamin has thrived on challenge since her days at The Heller School. A freshly minted graduate from Wellesley College with an interest in community mental health, she gave up pursuing an MPH at Columbia or Yale, and instead followed her high school sweetheart (now, husband) to Boston to study at The Heller School with Professor Gunnar Dybwad. “At 21, I was the youngest student at Heller,” recalled Wallace-Benjamin in a speech delivered to students at Heller’s 2004 graduation in Spingold Theater. Explaining how she found her place at Heller, she went on to say “I was surrounded by former commissioners and community leaders, people who had already led impressive careers, but I knew how to be a student. My world had been in the classroom, so I could offer these students with more work experience help with studying if they could help me grow up.” Time has proven that her Heller classmates did a great job.