Madison Sandoval-Lunn

As the Center’s Program Area Manager for Family Empowerment and Youth Development, Madison Sandoval-Lunn leverages her lived experience and over a decade of professional child welfare experience to lead, coordinate, and manage efforts related to promoting and enhancing family, youth, and stakeholder engagement across the Center’s service delivery areas and further the Children’s Bureau’s vision and priorities.

She advances these efforts by partnering with Children’s Bureau staff and cross-Center teams, including the Center’s pool of family, young adult, and national authority consultants. She also serves as the Lived Expertise Advisor for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation’s project studying effective methods for engaging people with lived experience to inform and improve federal policy, practice, and research. Prior to these two roles, she served as the Center’s Senior Young Adult Consultant Coordinator, where she managed and supervised the pool of Young Adult Consultants. She enhanced the Center’s culture and practice in engaging consultants with lived expertise by providing coaching, training, and operationalizing the Center’s engagement approach and framework.

Her experience with advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts began ten years ago on Capitol Hill, serving as the Senate Diversity Initiative’s Larry Bolden scholar for the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She has continued this work in consultation and partnership with universities, non-profit organizations, and child welfare and juvenile justice agencies, and alongside others with lived experience. Her expertise spans a wide breadth of knowledge, skills, and experience, including serving on the federal compliance review teams as a Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) and National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) reviewer and trainer; providing consultation and technical assistance to states and jurisdictions on continuous quality improvement, independent living programming, NYTD, family and youth engagement, stakeholder engagement; enhancing kinship navigator programming; supporting diligent recruitment of diverse resource families through market segmentation, developing faith-based partnerships, and creating public marketing campaigns and materials; informing the development and implementation of public policy on a range of child welfare issues; developing and delivering training on topic area of promotive and protective factors, youth engagement, positive youth development, child sexual abuse prevention, trauma-informed care, building prevention-oriented systems, racial equity, and serving LGTBQ+ youth and families.