Dee Bonnick, MSW

Dee Bonnick has been a national lived experience integration subject-matter expert and consultant for the past 10 years. Her work includes co-leading the development of the Family Empowerment and Leadership Academy (FELA) curriculum and serving as a subject-matter expert for the Quality Contact Visits product suites, congregate care product development brief, and Levels of Prevention product development brief. She has also served as a subject-matter expert consultant in tailored services delivery work in New Mexico, the US Virgin Islands, Rhode Island, and Vermont to support the implementation of family and youth engagement infrastructures including developing parent stakeholder advisory groups and lifting up work around fairness in practice in child welfare. She formerly led the Family Leaders in Child Welfare constituency group.  

Dee is also part of the New England Regional Learning Collaborative, where she leads work on improving parent engagement and partnership when transforming the “front door” of child welfare. In that role, she helped build a regional parent advisory committee to child welfare leadership and staff called Parent Leaders of New England (PLNE), the first of its kind in the country. She also served as a core member for a national child protection investigation participatory research project in 2022. Dee is a lived-experience expert consultant with the National Partnership for Child Safety and a part of the Casey Family Programs well-being measures workgroup. She is a member of the HOPE Family and Community Experts Council (FACEs) as well as a member of the HOPE National Advisory and FACEs subcommittee. She co-chairs the National Advisory Board for Opt-In for Families, a Doris Duke Foundation prevention initiative. Dee serves as a lived expert on the Bipartisan Policy Center Child Welfare Initiative and is a member of the Birth Parent National Network (BPNN) and the Birth and Foster Parent Partnership (BFPP) with the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance.

Dee’s personal and professional experience in child welfare spans most of her life.  She grew up in kinship care with a grandmother who fostered and adopted children. Dee is a mother of three who has had system involvement with her local child welfare agency when seeking support and resources for her son who needed help for his mental and behavioral health. From that experience, Dee went on to become a parent consultant in child welfare in her home state of Connecticut for 20 years. She was a family advocacy specialist supervisor for a statewide nonprofit organization for children’s behavioral health.  

Dee has vast experience in training, coaching, facilitation, public speaking, and project management. She has worked on numerous projects, trainings, and workshops to improve family engagement, partnership, and leadership. Dee was an education consultant for 15 years with Connecticut State Department of Education. She specialized in special education law to advocate for youth who were under the guardianship of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families. Dee has an extensive background in the field of mental and behavioral health as well as macro-level system transformation work. She completed the Sankofa Leadership Institute 2024 cohort.

Dee holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Southern Connecticut State University and an MSW from New York University, where she was the recipient of a 2017 Silver School of Social Work award.