Allison Davis Maxon

Allison Davis Maxon, M.S., LMFT is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of child welfare and children’s mental health. Specializing in Attachment, Trauma, and Permanency/Adoption, she has over twenty-five years of experience as a clinician, educator, advocate, and leader focused on helping children and families heal and thrive. She is currently the Executive Director for the National Center on Adoption and Permanency and was honored in 2017 with the prestigious Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute ‘Angel in Adoption’ award. Allison was the foster care consultant for the Paramount Pictures movie Instant Family and is the co-author of Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency: A Guide to Promoting Understanding and Healing in Adoption, Foster Care, Kinship Families and Third Party Reproduction, Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2019. Read more about Allison.

Sharon Kaplan Roszia

Sharon Kaplan Roszia is an internationally known educator, presenter, and author who has devoted over fifty years of her professional career to the institution of foster care, adoption, and relative care. While working in public and private agencies as well as private practice venues, she has focused on crisis pregnancy; infertility; infant adoptions; placement of children from the foster care system, including sibling groups and teenagers, and search and reunion. The additional issues of international adoptions; trans-racial adoptions; gay and lesbian built families and traumatized children with attachment challenges have also become a specialty.