The Capacity Building Center for States’ (the Center's) National Authority Teams are child welfare experts with a deep understanding of the issues and challenges facing the child welfare field that comes from years of experience at the local, state, and federal levels.
For each topic area, National Authority Teams include Center Program Area Leads and nationally recognized subject matter experts, as well as designated Family Consultants and Young Adult Consultants. Michelle and Megan were featured as Child Welfare Experts in the Workforce Development area! See their bios below:
Michelle Graef
Role: National Authority Consultant
Areas of Expertise: Workforce improvement strategies, organizational culture, systems change
Years of Child Welfare Experience: 29
At the Center, Michelle Graef, Ph.D., is a consultant and subject matter expert focusing on workforce improvement strategies, organizational culture, and systems change. Dr. Graef is currently the Principal Investigator and Project Director for the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD), funded by the Children’s Bureau. The QIC-WD is working with eight state and tribal child welfare agency sites to design, implement, and rigorously evaluate an array of evidence-informed workforce strategies and interventions.
Previously, Dr. Graef was the Principal Investigator of a comprehensive, multi-year program evaluation of Nebraska’s Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration (2014–2019). Recently, Dr. Graef served as the coprincipal investigator and associate director of the Midwest Child Welfare Implementation Center, a 5-year cooperative agreement funded by the Children’s Bureau (2008–2014). In this role, she worked with states and tribes in a 10-state region to provide technical assistance and evaluation and to facilitate peer-to-peer support to achieve systems change. She designed and delivered technical assistance services to four statewide, multi-year systems change initiatives to improve the quality and effectiveness of child welfare services. These changes were focused on organizational culture, administration, and direct practice with children and families.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Graef directed a team responsible for job analysis, training needs assessment, training program evaluation, and the development and validation of competencies for all child welfare and juvenile parole workers in the state of Nebraska (1992–2008). She led the design, validation, and implementation of innovative research-based systems for the selection and performance management of child welfare staff. Finally, she provided methodological and analytic consultation to a number of large-scale child protective services case file reviews for quality assurance purposes.
Megan Paul
Role: National Authority Consultant
Areas of Expertise: Workforce improvement, organizational development, systems change, personnel psychology
Years of Child Welfare Experience: 20
At the Center, Megan Paul, Ph.D., is a consultant and subject matter expert participating in the development of resources and direct service provision to states in the area of workforce and organizational development. Dr. Paul is an industrial-organizational psychologist who has worked exclusively in child welfare for more than 19 years, focusing on personnel psychology, organizational development, research and evaluation, and child welfare.
Dr. Paul is currently Research Associate Professor at the Center on Children, Families, and the Law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She conducts child welfare training development and evaluation for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services Division of Children and Family Services and serves as the lead workforce specialist for the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development, doing workforce intervention research with child welfare agencies in Washington, Milwaukee, and Oklahoma.