Brandy Hudson

Professional Child Welfare Experience: Since 1997
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

As a consultant and subject matter expert at the Center, Brandy Hudson supports resource development and service provision to states in the areas of primary prevention, racial equity, diversity and inclusion and family empowerment. In these roles, Ms. Hudson uses her passion for systems transformation, unwavering commitment to racial justice, and avid pursuit of radical lived expertise inclusion to inspire and motivate individuals, professionals, teams and communities to create and implement equitable and sustainable solutions for system change initiatives.

Ms. Hudson works as national director for the Youth Law Center’s Quality Parenting Initiative, providing shoulder-to-shoulder thought partnership and technical assistance to child welfare jurisdictional leaders across the nation to transform systems so every child and youth can thrive. Most recently, Ms. Hudson worked as a technical assistance project manager for Casey Family Programs where she worked to support jurisdictions in their FFPSA planning and implementation efforts and spent 5 years at the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency serving in various roles including program supervisor and special assistant, implementing approaches to child welfare that promote working alongside families and building on and around their strengths.

During her 25 years of professional experience in child welfare, Ms. Hudson has worked to develop innovative strategies to move upstream and support children in their original families through the development of concrete community-based supports, family strengthening language constructs, and cross-system approaches, thereby rendering foster care significantly less required. In all her work, Ms. Hudson draws on her own lived experience as a former foster and probation youth, poverty and child-welfare-impacted parent, and kinship caregiver working to elevate and center the voice and expertise of those most impacted by the child welfare and other family-serving systems as leaders and designers of transformation efforts.