Meet Our Staff

Role & Responsibility:
I work as a caseworker with families in Oregon who are looking to have a child or children join their family through adoption. Once a family completes the required adoption application, I become involved in the journey interviewing the family and completing the home study document. After a child is placed with an adoptive family, I visit the family and child in their home to make sure the transition is going smoothly, provide any resources or post placement support needed, and write post placement reports for State or International Country requirements.

Family:
I met my best friend, Alan, at Walla Walla College and we married in 1997. Alan and I have two children—Elliot, born in 2002, and Logan, born in 2005.

Part of the IFS Team Since: 2014

Little Known Facts About Me:
I often feel like I have a bit of a split personality! While I love adoption casework and counseling, I discovered a love of finances later in life. When my children were small, I returned to school and completed a second undergraduate degree through Linfield College in Accounting. I have since become a CPA and work as a controller for Habitat for Humanity in Bend, OR when I am not working on adoption cases. The combination of counseling and accounting is very unusual in my experience but I love working with families in the Habitat program as they seek to improve their family stability through home ownership and have found that my ability to explain financial concepts and planning helps them through the process.

I am also involved as the director of a large live nativity pageant each December in Central Oregon. We had over 120 cast and crew last year, complete with costumes and elaborate sets. Don’t tell my cast members but my favorite addition to the cast was our camel Big Al! It has been a wonderful and fun way to share a glimpse back to early A.D. Bethlehem on the night Christ was born and two or three thousand people will likely come through this year.