Promise to Protect is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to the protection of children from abuse and neglect. We are recognized by the IRS as a tax-deductible, charitable organization, or 501(c)(3).

Promise to Protect was established as an outgrowth of the work of the National Association to Protect Children (PROTECT). Through PROTECT’s work in the public arena for abused children, its founders and supporters saw an important unmet need: a "think tank" on child protection, offering real-world policy ideas, model legislation and citizen activism.

Promise to Protect does not take any government funding, but we welcome support from individuals, corporations and foundations.

Board of Directors
July, 2010

Ruby Andrew, JSM is a Professor of Law at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A highly-regarded expert in legislative drafting, Ms. Andrew lectured in Indonesia on policymaking and legislative drafting. She has been a Congressional analyst on child protection issues and was a Spaeth Fellow at Stanford Law School. Ms. Andrew has been a leading expert on child protection legislation and policy, and her work with the National Association to Protect Children led to landmark legal reform in Arkansas and California.


Joel A. Dvoskin, Ph.D., ABPP is Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Arizona, College of Medicine. Dr. Dvoskin studied psychology and law at the University of Arizona, where he received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1981. He subsequently completed a fellowship in forensic psychology at the Harvard Medical School. As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Dvoskin has worked predominately in maximum security prison and hospital settings, serving violent offenders with serious mental illness. Dr. Dvoskin presided over the nation's largest forensic and correctional mental health system for more than a decade, and served as New York State's Acting Commissioner of Mental Health, running the nation's largest mental health agency, with more than 23,000 employees and an annual operating budget of more than three billion dollars.

Dr. Dvoskin has attained national prominence as an expert in managing the risk of violent behavior and has appeared on national radio and television. Among many other topics, Dr. Dvoskin has lectured on management, domestic violence, the prevention of violence in schools and corporations, and mental health law and administration. He serves as a frequent expert witness, trainer, and public speaker, and has served as a consultant to federal agencies, and state, local and provincial governments throughout the United States and Canada. He has provided training and management consultation to corporate leaders from many Fortune 500 companies, and has worked with organizations as diverse as the United States Secret Service and the National Basketball Association.


Michelle Kreiger is Associate Judge of the Hoopa Valley Tribal Court in Hoopa, California. Since 2005, she has been actively in Promise to Protect's work on model child protection legislation and policy, including work on the California criminal code and national standards for child protection transparency and accountability.


Dr. Bruce D. Perry is the Senior Fellow of The ChildTrauma Academy, a not-for-profit organization based in Houston (www.ChildTrauma.org) and adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago. Dr. Perry is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children and Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered.

His experience as a clinician and a researcher with traumatized children has led many community and governmental agencies to consult Dr. Perry following high-profile incidents involving traumatized children such as the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine school shootings, the September 11th terrorist attacks, Katrina hurricane, the FLDS polygamist sect and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti. Dr. Perry is the author of over 300 journal articles, book chapters and scientific proceedings and is the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors, including the T. Berry Brazelton Infant Mental Health Advocacy Award, the Award for Leadership in Public Child Welfare and the Alberta Centennial Medal.

He has presented about child maltreatment, children's mental health, neurodevelopment and youth violence in a variety of venues including policy-making bodies such as the White House Summit on Violence, the California Assembly and U.S. House Committee on Education. Dr. Perry has been featured in a wide range of media including National Public Radio, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS News and the Oprah Winfrey Show. His work has been featured in documentaries produced by Dateline NBC, 20/20, the BBC, Nightline, CBC, PBS, as well as dozen international documentaries. Many print media have highlighted the clinical and research activities of Dr. Perry including a Pulitzer-prize winning series in the Chicago Tribune, US News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, Forbes ASAP, Washington Post, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. (full biography here, PDF)


Grier Weeks is Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children. He has worked extensively in state legislatures across the U.S. and in Congress on child protection legislation and policy. Weeks has testified before the U.S. House and Senate on child exploitation issues and child rescue technology.