When Lisa Specter-Dunaway, CEO of Families Forward Virginia, left for vacation in early March, she had no idea that she would be coming back 10 days later to an international health crisis. “While I was concerned, I knew that I had a strong leadership team in place that would make good decisions,” Specter-Dunaway recalls. “The pandemic-related decision making is ongoing, but this strong group of leaders laid a solid foundation for our ongoing work while supporting our staff.”
Families Forward Virginia is a nonprofit dedicated to disrupting the cycles of child abuse, neglect and poverty in partnership with families and communities. In 2017, Families Forward Virginia was created as a merger between two organizations with similar missions — CHIP of Virginia and Prevent Child Abuse Virginia. “It was absolutely the right move in terms of our ability to support our 50-plus community partners,” Specter-Dunaway says, “and we’ve seen a 40% growth in funding and staff post-merger.”
For Specter-Dunaway, her work is all about families. “We support more than 50 local organizations across the commonwealth in their work with families,” she says. “Being a family-focused workplace is one of the most important aspects of our culture — living our mission. We focus on getting things done, helping our affiliates, changing how people view parenting. We don’t focus on the specific boxes that must be checked to get those things done. This sparks tremendous growth in our staff to develop new, better and different ways of delivering the results that we need.”
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