Family Finding® is developed and advanced by the team at Pale Blue. Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel bring decades of direct practice, research, and systems-level leadership to this work.
Our Team
Kevin Campbell
Kevin Campbell is the co-founder and CEO of Pale Blue Dot Inc. and the creator of Family Finding® and Family Seeing® — relational practice models now used across North America, Australia, and Western Europe to help families, communities, and governments restore belonging for children who have lost it. An American child protection, children's mental health, and health care innovator, Kevin has spent his career pursuing a single conviction: that every child has a family, and that they can be found if we try.
Kevin's work has changed law. Family Finding® has been written into United States federal legislation three times — the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act (2008, signed by President Bush), the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act (2011, signed by President Obama), and the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act (2014). It has reshaped family-engagement practice for millions of families across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Cambodia, and it remains one of the most legislatively recognized relational practice models in U.S. child welfare history.
He has also brought Family Finding® to some of the hardest places a family can be torn apart. In 2018, Kevin served as an expert in a successful United States Federal District Court case on behalf of parents and children forcibly separated at the U.S. border under the "zero tolerance" immigration policy — an effort that helped win relief for separated families. In 2020, with Pale Blue. and the Kempe Center at the University of Denver, he co-created the Truth Telling in Child Welfare collaborative, now spreading across the United States, which gathers the testimony and post-traumatic wisdom of young people, parents, relatives, and Tribes about the harms of family separation and policing used as a proxy for child safety.
Increasingly, Kevin's work reaches beyond child welfare into health itself. As a senior advisor to major American health plans, he is helping to redefine whole-person, whole-family, and whole-community health as something people build together — not something we receive at a doctor's office, a therapist's office, or a pharmacy. The ultimate upstream approach to protecting the safety of children, he argues, is promoting the well-being of parents and families — not as recipients of government programs, but as people with the authority, resources, and freedom to be the actors and authors of their own lives.
Kevin's work has been featured twice on CBS 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, and in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, TIME, and dozens of other national and international publications. He has published widely on the need for radical reform of child protection, children's mental health, and juvenile justice systems, and on equitable, high-quality health and mental health care. He continues to speak on the issues of youth and families around the world.
Elizabeth Wendel
Elizabeth Wendel is the president and co-founder of Pale Blue Dot Inc. and, with Kevin Campbell, the co-author of Family Seeing®. A leading expert and trainer in Family Finding®, she has built much of the practice, playbooks, and learning that let others do this work — and she does it, still, side by side with young people, parents, and families. Pale Blue. honors the relational capability for justice and equity for each of us on this pale blue planet we call home, and Elizabeth's career is a practice of that conviction.
She began in Philadelphia, where she established and led the city's Family Finding® program — one of the largest in the United States — and, over time, helped more than 10,000 young people forge over 26,000 supportive kinship and relational connections. Since then she has trained many thousands of practitioners, supervisors, and system leaders across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and Australia through bootcamps, train-the-trainer institutes, and multi-year implementations. Her direct practice has reconnected families across the United States, Australia, Romania, Mexico, Colombia, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast.
Elizabeth is a sought-after keynote speaker and facilitator on relational practice, belonging, and the science of connection, and a prolific author of practice playbooks, handbooks, and tools. She co-authored Family Seeing® and created Pale Blue.'s Relational Warmth framework — an approach that makes the felt quality of a relationship visible, sayable, and improvable rather than simply counting who is present in a child's life. She also developed tools to address "model fatigue" in large-group learning, and she serves on the editorial board of the Family Justice Journal.
She advises at the highest levels of policy and practice. Elizabeth is a senior advisor to two of the largest healthcare companies in the United States and partners with governments and private organizations across Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States on strategic design, policy framing, and practice-model development. Beginning in 2020, with Pale Blue. and the Kempe Center at the University of Denver, she co-founded the Truth Telling in Child Welfare collaborative, which gathers the testimony and post-traumatic wisdom of young people, parents, relatives, and Tribes about the harms of family separation.
Elizabeth holds a Master's in Social Work from Temple University, is a certified trauma-informed care expert, and is a recipient of the Rising Leader Scholarship from the Alliance for Children and Families. Earlier roles — in Philadelphia's only Family Finding® program, with teen parents (where she designed a family-networking model), and as a hospice end-of-life grief counselor — shaped her conviction that our relationships and social environment sit at the center of human health. A published author, she continues to write on early relational health, economic justice, and human wellbeing. Alongside Kevin Campbell, she co-authored Family Seeing®; learn more at familyseeing.org.