A focus on children
For more than four decades, Carol Wilson Spigner has advocated for the safety of children.
An associate professor in Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice, Spigner is a former associate commissioner for the Children's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) who has helped implement numerous policies that protect children. She developed the Adoption and Safe Families Act to promote adoption, the Multi Ethnic Placement Act, which prohibits delaying an adoption or foster care placement based on the race or color of a child, and the John Chaffee Foster Care Independence Act, which helps foster care youths achieve self-sufficiency. More recently, Spigner assisted in the review of Philadelphia's Department of Human Services, which was cited for failures that put children at risk and resulted in preventable deaths.
"I love to work with children," Spigner says. "I also like working at a community level to create environments that [create] safe places."
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