STP Faculty Bio Page

Co-Director Emerge David Adams, Ed.D., is co-founder as well as Co-Director of Emerge, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first counseling program in the nation for men who abuse women, established in 1977. Dr. Adams has led groups for men who batter for 30 years and has led parenting education classes for fathers for 6 years. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on men who batter and has conducted trainings of social service and criminal justice professionals in 41 states and 11 nations. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, including “Identifying the Assaultive Husband in Court: You Be the Judge”, published in the Boston Bar Journal.  Dr. Adams is past Co-Chair of the Justice and Accountability Committee (the criminal justice committee) of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence, and is Coordinator of the National Danger Assessment Training Project. His book, “Why Do They Kill? Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners”
was published by Vanderbilt University Press in September 2007.

Juan Carlos Areán works as a program manager for the Family Violence Prevention Fund, in Newton, Massachusetts. He has devoted the last 17 years to engaging men across different cultures to become better fathers, intimate partners and allies to end domestic violence and achieve gender equity. For over a decade, he worked at the Men’s Resource Center for Change in various capacities, including director of the Men Overcoming Violence and the Refugees and Immigrants Programs. He also worked as a sexual assault prevention specialist at Harvard University.

Mr. Areán is co-author of various articles, curricula and educational tools for men, including Working With Fathers in Batterer Intervention Programs (Oxford University Press), Breaking the Cycle: Fathering After Violence (FVPF) and an on-line toolkit for engaging men and boys in violence prevention.

He has been instrumental in developing the implementation and training of the FVPF’s international initiative Coaching Boys into Men and recently helped produce the ground-breaking documentary Something my Father Would Do: Overcoming Legacies of Family Violence. 

Mr. Areán sits in several governing and advisory boards, including the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence and the Massachusetts Governor’s Council to Address Sexual and Domestic Violence. He is an active trainer, who has led hundreds of workshops and presentations throughout the United States, as well as in Mexico, Chile, Russia, Sweden, Austria, the United Nations and the US Congress.

Breaking the Cycle: Fathering After Violence

Curriculum Guidelines and Tools for Batterer Intervention Programs (Free curriculum and materials!)

Jacquelyn L. Boggess is the Co-Director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice (formerly The Center on Fathers, Families, and Public Policy), in Madison, Wisconsin. Ms. Boggess has worked with the Center since its inception in 1995. Her work as a policy analyst involves the investigation of the welfare system, the family law courts, and the child support system. Her particular interest is the interrelations among these systems, and how the social welfare policy and practice that result
from this relationship effect low-income fathers, mothers and children. Additionally, Ms. Boggess has concentrated on the question of the impact of government initiated “family formation” and father involvement policy on women and children. Her work in this regard has resulted in connections and collaborations with domestic violence organizations and progressive
advocacy groups working on poverty reduction, violence prevention, and economic justice for parents and children.

Eusebus Ekere, MHA is originally born in Nigeria West Africa and migrated to United States in 2001. He is a proud father of one Winnie Ekere and married to Chidimma Ekere. Eusebus has worked with parents especially fathers for over 4 years. He was a presenter in a panel organized by spectrum communities Grand Rapids “How to involve dad’s in families”. Euse is the program coordinator/facilitator for proud fathers proud parents program for center of family development at United Methodist Community House. He is also the program coordinator for Healthy Marriage Healthy Relationship and a member of Michigan fatherhood coalition group.

Edward W. Gondolf, Ed.D., M.P.H., is Director of Research for the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute (MARTI), in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he conducts grant-funded research on the response of the courts, mental health practitioners, alcohol treatment clinicians, and batterer programs to domestic violence. He most recently completed a clinical trail of specialized counseling for African-American men arrested for domestic violence, under a grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and a comparison study of case management with similar men under a grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD). He is currently evaluating the effectiveness of supplemental mental health treatment for domestic violence offenders with NIJ funds.

From 1994-2001, Dr. Gondolf was Principal Investigator of a multi-site evaluation of batterer intervention programs funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This seven-year study tracked 840 batterers and their female partners from four geographically-dispersed cities. Dr. Gondolf also recently completed four other court studies sponsored by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and two foundation-funded evaluations of intensive outpatient treatment for alcohol abuse.

Dr. Gondolf has been a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) since 1982. During 1991 to 1994, he was the founding president of the Domestic Abuse Counseling Center (DACC) in Pittsburgh. DACC receives approximately 2000 referrals per year from the domestic violence courts in the Pittsburgh area. From 1988 to 1992, Dr. Gondolf served as a research fellow at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh Medical School, and as Clinical Consultant to the Domestic Relations Clinic, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Pittsburgh. In 1993-1996, he was Research Consultant to the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Gondolf has authored nine books on wife abuse, including, Men Who Batter: An Integrated Approach to Stopping Wife Abuse (1985), Battered Women as Survivors: An Alternative to Treating Learned Helplessness (1988), Psychiatric Response to Family Violence: Identifying and Confronting neglected Danger (1990), and Batterer Intervention Systems: Issues, Outcomes and Recommendations (2002), as well as over 120 research and clinical articles on men who batter, domestic violence in general, and community development. Psychiatric Response, based on a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), analyzes data from 382 psychiatric patients to document the clinical neglect of reported family violence in favor of identifying mental disorders. Battered Women as Survivors, done in cooperation with the Texas Council on Family Violence, analyzes 6,000 intake interviews with shelter residents to establish ethnic and regional incidents, women’s help-seeking, police response, and batterer types. Assessing Women Battering in Mental Health Settings (1997), draws on this previous research and a national survey of battered women’s services to identify issues and recommend procedures for clinicians.

Dr. Gondolf has extended his work to the international scene presenting papers at conferences in Portugal, Spain, Dominican Republic, India, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Australia, and Russia. His second Fulbright Award for research and lecturing in India addressed the impact of rural colleges on community development, and the impact of the Indian women’s movements on wife abuse. During the last decade, Dr. Gondolf has participated in bi-annual symposiums on domestic violence and alcohol abuse at St. Petersburg State University in Russia, and conducted collaborative research comparing spousal homicide in the United States and Russia.

Dr. Gondolf received a bachelor’s degree in sociology focusing on social psychology and deviance from Princeton University in 1970, a master’s degree in community psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1976, a doctor’s degree in education with a concentration in community sociology from Boston University in 1979, and a master’s in public health majoring in psychiatric epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988. He also completed a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellowship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh Medical School, in the late 1980’s. He was born and raised near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Matthew Grimes is Court Liaison and a co-facilitator at the ADVANCE Program of Lutheran Social Services of South Central Pennsylvania and a MHS student at Lincoln University.  He is a 33-year-old African American man who has also worked successfully in music and culinary arts. He brings particular knowledge about pop culture and its influence on youth and male socialization.  He has been a speaker in schools and has provided training for police and community social service workers on the topics of masculinity and domestic violence.

Julie L. Johnson, Grand Blanc, Michigan, is the director of The P.A.U.S.E. Program. For over 20 years, Johnson has passionately worked toward ending intimate partner violence on several fronts. Johnson considered an expert group facilitator and trainer is a Metaphorologist and holds a M.A. in Transformative Language Arts and an M. S. in Psychology. Johnson’s unique cognitive behavioral approach, using metaphor and art therapy techniques, has helped hundreds of clients rewire programmed abusive behaviors.

As the former clinical training director for the Domestic Abuse Counseling Center (DACC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the largest batterer’s intervention program in western Pennsylvania, Johnson introduced metaphor, art therapy and the multi-sensory approach to the agency.

Johnson has written curricula and developed programs beyond the one-size-fits-all paradigm, which yield completion rates well above the national average for BIP’s. Ms. Johnson’s multi-dimensional work includes:

• Facilitation of over 70 training workshops for counseling/rehab centers,
  judges, probation departments, teachers, and students in both the U.S.
  and Canada on the use of metaphor and art therapy to defuse resistance
  among highly resistant clients.
• Program development and facilitator for youth alternative education program
• Counselor for women and youth in victim service programs.
• Adjunct professor: Art Therapy/Methods and Theory, Communication Skills.

Johnson’s training techniques were recently published in RESPECT, a United Kingdom publication (2007). Johnson was also cited as an expert on domestic violence intervention techniques in, Leading Groups in Corrections: Skills and Techniques (2003) published by The American Correctional Association. Ms. Johnson is also the author of The Healing Journal: A guide to journaling, childhood sexual abuse and recovery published by The Menninger Foundation.

Julie Johnson, with her unique style, quick wit and seasoned ability transforms abstract concepts into tangible applications.

Juanita Jones, MHS, is Program Coordinator and a co-facilitator at the ADVANCE Program of Lutheran Social Services of South Central Pennsylvania, a domestic abuse intervention program in York County.  She is also a therapist at Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries in a specialized in-home program for adolescent sex offenders. She is a co-founder of York Rape Crisis Center (now Victim Assistance Center) and ACCESS-York, a shelter for battered women.  She participated in the design, implementation, and co-facilitation of Women Choosing Non-Violence, which addresses women’s use of violence, and ADVANCE Fatherhood for men whose abuse affected a child.  She earned a Master of Human Services degree from Lincoln University, and additional background includes work in crisis intervention, public welfare, and adult sex offender treatment.

David Mandel, MA, has been working in the domestic field for over 19 years in Middletown, Connecticut. Mr. Mandel writes, trains and consults nationally on improving systems’ responses to domestic violence when children are involved and batterer accountability and change. In addition to national research on batterer’s perceptions of their children’s exposure to their violence, Mr. Mandel has developed a series of public awareness and outreach posters designed to shift cultural attitudes about domestic violence. He has written a forty-hour curriculum, entitled Dedication, which is being used to train all new batterer intervention providers in Texas. Mr. Mandel has also written a curriculum for working fathers entitled Being Connected and co-authored a batterer intervention program manual.

Mr. Mandel has extensive experience improving the response of child protection agencies to domestic violence. He has worked with New York City’s Administration for Children Services, various US Greenbook sites and other jurisdictions to improve outcomes for children in families where batterer’s behavior is a concern. David has developed and piloted a 2 ½ day
national workshop seminar, “Safe and Together: Concrete Strategies for Addressing Domestic Violence When Children Are the Focus.” He is currently overseeing the implementation of a statewide network of domestic violence consultants for the Connecticut Department of Children and Families.

Web:  www.endingviolence.com

David Mathews, PsyD, LICSW, is the Director of Therapy, Domestic Abuse Project, in Minneapolis, Minnesota and has over twenty-five years of experience working in the field of violence and violence prevention. He is employed as Director of Therapy at Domestic Abuse Project (DAP) where he oversees all counseling and therapeutic services for women, men, children and adolescents as well as some special projects.

Dr. Mathews has been in private practice at the Trust Family Center at Judson in Southwest Minneapolis for over 15 years. He has specialized in work on violence, men’s issues, post-traumatic stress, violence response trainings, school violence, adolescents, couples, families, parenting, and relationships.

Prior to his employment at DAP he worked for Casa de Esperanza for two and a half years as the Systems Change Manager, providing cultural proficiency trainings and consultation. He worked for 13 years at the Wilder Community Assistance Program facilitating men’s domestic abuse groups, women’s domestic abuse groups, children’s domestic abuse groups, parent groups, and groups for young adults who have experienced violence. Dr. Mathews developed, assisted in creating, or coordinated more than 20 different programs related to violence or violence prevention, including Restorative Parenting and
the Community Violence Response Team Project.

Dr. Mathews has been an active member of the Initiatives for Violence-Free Families and Communities in Ramsey and Hennepin Counties for sixteen years. One of the Action Teams within the Initiatives Dr. Mathews has been on since its inception is the Men’s Messages Action Team which created and has overseen the Men’s Line that is a 24-hour free and confidential crisis, help, counseling, and referral phone line specifically for men, the first of its kind in the Country and now receives about 100 calls per month from men throughout the State of Minnesota. Mathews has been a member of the
Archdiocese Committee on Domestic Violence for sixteen years.

Dr. Mathews has authored several works related to violence, bullying, men who batter, Restorative Parenting in the aftermath of violence in the home, violence in the workplace and violence prevention. In addition, he has produced or co-produced several media products for training professionals in the field of intimate partner violence/ domestic violence. He presents and trains professionals on local, national and international levels. Dr. Mathews teaches a course on domestic violence and prevention at the University of Minnesota in the undergraduate program in Family Violence at the School of Social Work and two courses (Adolescent Psychology – Undergrad Psychology and Program Design and Community Intervention – Graduate Community Psychology) at Metropolitan State University. He also consults with businesses, governmental agencies, and other organizations relative to violence and violence prevention.

Fernando Mederos, Ed.D. became Director of Special Projects—Fatherhood at the Massachusetts Department of Social Services in 2006 after serving as a consultant on intervening with men who batter in the agency’s Domestic Violence Unit since 1997.  His mission is to increase the Department’s capacity to engage positively with fathers in a way that is strength-based, culturally competent, sensitive to safety and domestic violence issues, and promotes healthy, nurturing, and respectful engagement with children and partners.  He is a practitioner (consultant, writer and trainer), and he focuses on identifying culturally-based values, models and practices that are effective in working with fathers and that promote respectful and egalitarian relationships between men and women in diverse cultures.

He has consulted with the U.S. Department of Justice (OVW), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and organizations funded by OVW to provide technical assistance to federal grantees.  He is co-chair of the Board of the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence (Alianza).

He is principal writer of:  Accountability and Connection with Abusive Men: A New Child Protection Response to Increasing
Family Safety. (2004), a manual on intervening with men who batter in the child protection caseload and co-editor of Programs for Men Who Batter:  Intervention and Prevention Strategies In A Diverse Society.  [2002: Aldarondo, E. & Mederos, F. (Eds.) Kingston, New Jersey: Civic Research Institute.]

Important resource:

Children
& DV Toolbox (many free materials)

Gateway Project Program ManagerLisa Nitsch, BA is the Program Manager for Gateway Project, and is a lifelong resident of Baltimore City, Maryland. She has worked at that House of Ruth Maryland for over ten years. The Gateway Project is the men’s abuser intervention service of the domestic violence prevention agency. Mrs. Nitsch oversees the day-to-day operation of the program and coordinates new program initiatives to improve the quality and scope of services. She was a principle driving force in the philosophical shift and functional redesign of the program from ‘The Batterers’ Program’ to ‘The Gateway Project’ in 2003. This adaptation of the program focused on supporting men in a change process by encouraging them to set their own personal goals without shame while still holding them accountable for their abusive behavior.

Mrs. Nitsch currently serves as the Vice President of Women In Fatherhood, Inc. She is also an active member of the Maryland Regional Practitioner’s Network for Fathers & Families Board of Directors. She serves as a member of Baltimore City’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team and the city’s Coordinating Council, and is Co-Chair of the Maryland Abuser Intervention Collaborative.

Mrs. Nitsch’s focus in the domestic violence field is on evaluating “success” for abuser intervention programs, engaging men in work to end violence against women, and coordinating public systems to best ensure victim safety. She demonstrates strength in creating community partnerships among programs that have historically had conflicting agendas and provides technical assistance in this area to programs across the country.

Mr. Rice currently serves as Special Assistant for the Office of the Secretary, Maryland Department of Human Resources – “Maryland’s Human Services Agency”.  The Maryland Department of Human Resources administers and provides oversight to statewide domestic violence efforts through the Victims of Crime Assistance Program, The Domestic Violence Program, and Rape Crisis and Sexual Assault Program.

He formerly served as Chief Operating Officer for Communities Organized To Improve Life, Inc. and historic community development corporation located in Southwest Baltimore City.  Prior to joining COIL he served as Chief Operating Officer and Director of Men’s Services for the Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development (CFWD).  While at CFWD he assisted in the developing a partnership with the House of Ruth Maryland Gateway Project, one of the first in the area between a Responsible Fatherhood oriented service provider and an Abuser Intervention Program (AIP). More recently Mr. Rice served on the Family and Relationship Panel for the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s Decade for Change Summit and served as national faculty for the first Institute on Fatherhood, Visitation and Domestic Violence sponsored by the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

He holds Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Criminal Justice from the University of Baltimore with a specialization in Corrections.  Mr. Rice also serves as an Adjunct Faculty member in the University of Baltimore’s Division of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Social Policy.  He is currently pursuing his Doctor of Public Health degree at Morgan State University.

Additional:

Mr. Rice’s past employment experience covers a great cross-section of diverse areas such as substance abuse counseling in correctional setting, foster worker in local   within the Human Services arena. While working for the Baltimore City Department of Social Services Mr. Rice was given the task of reunification of families.  He would often assist in devising treatment plans for parents in efforts to strengthen the fragile family unit.  As an Addictions Counselor III within the Maryland correctional system, Mr. Rice worked with incarcerated inmates teaching classes in Moral Problem Solving and Relapse Prevention. Working in corrections exposed Mr. Rice to low-income non-custodial fathers who were in need of support services (i.e. ongoing substance abuse treatment, domestic violence counseling, child support arrearage issues, and access to children concerns).  He actively pursued resources to meet the fathers’ needs.

Roger Steffy, MDiv, is Director and a co-facilitator at the ADVANCE Program of Lutheran Social Services of South Central Pennsylvania, a domestic abuse intervention program in York County.  An ordained minister with 14 years of pastoral experience, he has done domestic violence education work with clergy, churches, and human service professionals for 16 years.
He began working with batterers in 1996 and accepted this position with ADVANCE in 2003.  He has worked with adult sex offenders, and with victims of ritualistic sexual abuse.  He and his wife, Carol, have two young-adult children.  Roger loves hiking, birding, music, and flowers, and is passionate about fostering authentic non-abusive masculinity as an alternative to the dominator model of manhood.

Lee Taft is a nationally recognized expert on apology and its role in the transformative processes of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Lee worked as a dually board certified trial specialist in Dallas, Texas for more than twenty years before entering Harvard Divinity School in 1996. Today he designs responses to injury – and systems to support those responses-based on accountability, fairness, and integrity. His publications include Apology Subverted the seminal essay on apology in legal contexts published by the YALE LAW JOURNAL, Apology and Medical Error published by the ANNALS OF HEALTH LAW, Apology Within a Moral Dialectic published by the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW, and Disclosure Danger published this spring by the HARVARD HEALTH POLICY REVIEW. Last summer, he partnered with Stanford University to design and launch PEARL, a system-wide approach to unanticipated outcomes in medical care. In domestic violence settings, Lee has worked directly with both the perpetrator and recipient of harm and has trained professional staffs who work with these populations.

Web: http://www.taftsolutions.com/index.html

Professor Richard M. Tolman, LMSW, Ph.D is a Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Social Work. He received his doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MSW from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on violence against women and children, the effectiveness of interventions designed to change violent and abusive behavior, and the traumatic effects of violence on the well-being of victims.  He began work with batterer intervention programs in 1980, and was involved in early efforts in the 1990’s to create collaborations between positive fathering programs and batterer intervention programs. His current projects include research on the impact of and prevention of psychological abuse during pregnancy and involvement of men as allies to end violence against women.

Tolman is on the editorial board of the Journal of Emotional Abuse, and was formerly the associate editor of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. He has served as a domestic violence expert on a number of national panels, including NIMH, National Institute of Justice, the National Research Council, and the National Women’s Resource Center.

Oliver Williams, MSW, MPH, Ph.D., Professor, University of Minnesota School of Social Work; Director, Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, St. Paul, MN

Oliver J. Williams, Ph.D., has worked in the field of domestic violence for more than 28 years and has provided individual, couples, and family counseling. He has been a substance abuse counselor, child welfare and delinquency worker, worked in battered women’s shelters, co-facilitated recovery groups for sexual assault and battered women, developed curricula for batterers’ intervention programs and facilitated counseling groups in these programs. He has provided training across the United States and abroad on research and service-delivery surrounding partner abuse.

Dr. Williams’ extensive research and publications in scholarly journals and books have centered on creating effective service delivery, prevention , and intervention strategies to address violent behavior and its consequences. He serves on several national advisory boards and received numerous awards for his work addressing issues of domestic violence. Dr. Williams received a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Michigan State University, a Masters in Social Work from Western Michigan University, and a Masters in Public Health and a Ph.D. in Social Work both from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker.