Nancy received her Master’s degree in Social Work from Columbia University School of Social Work (1976) where her focus was on community organizing, child advocacy, and children’s services. When Nancy was a youngster, she and her brothers accompanied their mother, a Manhattan community planning board activist, on picket lines protesting for affordable and low-income housing. As a teenager growing up in New York City, Nancy volunteered, both after school and during summers, at Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association, a settlement house in Yorkville, at a summer camp for inner city children, and she tutored younger children at a local community center in a housing project. Throughout high school, Nancy worked on political campaigns for anti-war candidates and others who dedicated their lives to causes such as anti-poverty and anti-discrimination.

Nancy’s life’s journey has continued her passion for equity and social justice with almost 40 years of experience working with families, parents, siblings, and individuals with autism and other disabilities. She began her career during the deinstitutionalization revolution in the 1970s in NY State where she provided counseling and casework services to support people with intellectual disabilities with the “transition shock” experience as they moved out of institutions into the community. As a result of that successful initiative, she was a co-founder of the first Article 16 Mental Health Clinic for people with disabilities in NY State in the early 1980s. The model of this innovative clinic was to provide therapeutic and psychiatric services as well as staff development and training to group home staff. It was working with adults with intellectual disabilities who had been institutionalized for forty and fifty years that inspired Nancy to work with children in prevention, early intervention, and preschool. For 18 years, she was the Program Director of a preschool for children on the autistic spectrum in Putnam County, NY. She and her staff worked collaboratively with a mainstream nursery school to begin an inclusive preschool for 3-5 year olds in the 1990s, the first of its kind in Northern Westchester/Putnam.

Nancy is the Secretary of the Board of Directors of ALS United Greater NY, Inc. She has served on the Boards of the Putnam/Dutchess Child Care Councils as well as a Head Start Advisory Committee. Nancy is committed to “healing the future” one child at a time. She has worked with creative arts therapists and knows the value of this approach to foster recovery for children who have had adverse childhood experiences.