Colorado Coalition for Adoptive Families (COCAF)

We are very lucky to have the following professionals on our Expert Panel who are volunteering their time and expertise to answer questions for families and professionals. The experts on our panel, listed alphabetically by last name, include:

Eileen Bisgard - Legal Issues
Eileen has been involved professionally in the field of juvenile law for over 25 years. She served as a GAL (Guardian Ad Litem) for about 18 of those years and spent 13 years as the director of a child placement agency. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Child Advocacy Clinical Program at DU Law School, as well as a staff attorney at the Rocky Mountain Children's Law Center.
Eileen has trained foster and adoptive parents for nearly 20 years in diverse areas, including licensing, behavioral management, foster parent rights, and fetal alcohol syndrome/effects. She has represented intervening foster parents for much of her 25 years as a practicing attorney, has co-authored a pamphlet on grandparents' rights, and updates the foster-parents’ rights manual sold by the Law Center. Eileen has been a foster parent, and is an adoptive parent.
Jill McGuire - Adoptees and International Adoption
Jill has been an occupational therapist for the past ten years. She currently is in the process of adopting internationally and is an adoptee herself. Jill's mission is to make adoption easier and more affordable in this country.
Kristi Muro-Dougherty – Interacting with Departments of Human/Social Services
Kristi was an adoption caseworker in a metro county department of human services for six years. She received her Master’s of Social Work degree from the University of Denver. She has experience with the entire adoption process, from the homestudy to transitioning into the adoptive home to post-placement support. Child development, particularly the relationship between attachment and a child’s development, is an area of special interest to Kristi. After her years of work with foster and adoptive families and very special and challenging children, Kristi has become very fond of this population. She experienced firsthand the frustration and elation with the process and hopes for more elation and less frustration. Kristi’s family, too, has been touched by adoption, as her father was adopted as a young child. She is committed to facilitating the adoption process for families and children.

Dr. Rick Delaney is a psychologist who has worked with foster and adoptive families for over 25 years, helping them to understand and raise children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Dr. Delaney will be posting bi-monthly columns on topics associated with fostering and adopting traumatized children on the Foster Care and Adoptive Community web site.

Do You Have a Question for One of Our Experts?

If you have a question for Eileen, Jill, or Ginny, please email it to: cocafcave@yahoo.com, and include the name of the panel member in the subject line. Your email will be forwarded to and read only by the professional that you have specified. Each expert has offered to respond within seven days of receipt of an email; if s/he is out of town, you will be notified as to when you can reasonably expect a response.

ARCHIVED CORRESPONDENCE

For informational purposes, we are archiving and making available previous correspondence; the questions & responses have all identifying information removed. If you would prefer not to have your correspondence posted, please let us know.

Our panel members are very glad to be able to respond to your questions. However, the response is meant to be educational, and is by no means a substitute for appropriate mental health or medical services for your foster or adopted child and/or family. This column is not an emergency or hot line service. If you have an emergency, please contact 911 or the appropriate agency. Advice given in this column may apply only to the individual child or family referenced. If there are questions about how discussed topics apply to your child, please consult a mental health professional or family physician.

When developing any family interventions there needs to be protections in place to guard against misuse of strategies, harm to the child, as well as insensitivity to the child’s history, developmental age, past trauma, etc. The interventions should always, of course, be legal, abide by state regulations, and be in the child’s best interests. One of the best protections of safety comes in the use of a multi-disciplinary team (e.g. the therapist, social worker, and parents) which develops and sanctions the interventions jointly.

In all cases, interventions should take into account the child’s health and well-being, the need for placement stability, the reduction of stress upon the family, and the healthy empowerment of the foster or adoptive parents.

Page Last Updated: May 14, 2005