Elizabeth Wendel
Elizabeth Wendel, MSW, LSW is a Family FindingTM and Family SeeingTM co-author, expert, and brings extensive practice experience for both the provision of Family FindingTM and Family SeeingTM practice, training, and coaching. Ms. Wendel has expertise in the technical approach of practice at both micro (family) and macro (systems) levels and provides expert guidance for tool application, process-oriented approach, and outcomes measurement. Ms. Wendel uses creative content-building skills to share the learning of Family FindingTM and Family SeeingTM across the globe, for clients and online content. Ms. Wendel is a co-author of the revision II Family SeeingTM work supporting a public health and biological framework for family well-being systems change.
Elizabeth spent the early part of her career working and building the Family FindingTM program in her home city of Philadelphia, on the eastern coast of the United States, one of the largest Family FindingTM programs in the United States. The program successfully served over 10,000 young people from Philadelphia and neighboring regions during her tenure, connecting them with over 26,000 supports, creating a legacy. Elizabeth also spent time working with non-profit leadership on new program development specifically targeted toward transition-age youth. She worked alongside city leadership, including family court judges, to create knowledge of Family FindingTM practice for other practitioners and professionals. Elizabeth led a team of Family Finders that found, engaged, and supported families in network building and healing across the globe. Her tenure included families engaged across the United States as well as reconnection for families in Australia, Romania, Mexico, Columbia, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast.
“Changing the world isn’t an impossible dream. It is a relentlessness that we practice one day at a time.”
— Elizabeth Wendel
Elizabeth has worked on organizational culture development, honing her understanding and focus for the organizational cultures that develop and often influence morale, learning, capacity building, and success for initiatives and utilized this knowledge to create tools for understanding “model fatigue” during large group learning. Included in her projects were organizational culture study and development, new funding, capacity building, facilitation, trauma-transformed practice, long-term connectedness for youth in care, and transitional planning. In her tenure with non-profit work, Elizabeth also received her certification as a trauma-informed care expert.
Elizabeth is an alumnus of Temple University, where she attended graduate school and obtained her Master’s in Social Work. During that time, she worked in the Family FindingTM program, as well as in programs serving teen parents, where she built a family networking model. Elizabeth also spent time working in an in-patient hospice facility as an end-of-life grief counselor, where she built extensive rapport in family meeting practice, facilitation, finding family, and capturing life stories. Both experiences created a deep understanding of the human condition, particularly as it relates to our development and humanity in the eyes of those who surround us. Her extensive knowledge of human relationships, social environment, complex health determinants, public systems, effect family-led capacity building, and healing was foundational in this time and has only continued to grow in her current work. Elizabeth is the recipient of the Rising Leader Scholarship from the Alliance for Children and Families, a public lecturer and keynote speaker, and a published writer.
Elizabeth is a Family FindingTM model expert, engaging in public speaking opportunities and presentations, facilitation of learning sessions, strategy building, and organizational culture framing. Within that work, Elizabeth has connected and currently works as a senior advisor with several large healthcare companies in the United States, providing senior consulting for complex care populations, including foster care-specific health plans.
Elizabeth is currently a Subject Matter Expert for Chief Red Bear Lodge, Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, Metis Child, and Family Services Authority, Manitoba Canada, Michif Child, and Family Services, Manitoba, Canada. Elizabeth serves in an advisory role for countless projects in family well-being, as well as other complex systems work, across the globe including the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Western Europe, and Southern Australia in partnership with private organizations and public welfare systems.
She is extremely passionate about positive systems’ disruption and working from a place of solution-focused problem-solving at both family and systems levels. Ms. Wendel has dedicated her work to connecting with practitioners and families from a place of whole health and wellness, creating space in both micro and macro practice to imagine and fulfill possibilities.