Who We Are

Kevin Campbell is a Child Protection, Children's Mental Health, and Health Care Innovator and co-founder of Pale Blue. Pale Blue. is a collaboration that seeks to disseminate learning and participatory methods which explore the intersection of Equality, Economics, and the Environment as the foundation for human health, flourishing, and justice. Kevin developed Family Finding® and Family Seeing®, a set of strategies now utilized throughout North America, Australia, and Western Europe to convene, catalyze, and facilitate families, communities, and governments in their work to respond to the problems that most affect our lives and futures.

Kevin and Pale Blue. have authored and contributed to the development of health plans in the United States that equitably improve access to and quality of health care for millions of Americans. Kevin's Family Finding® and Family Seeing® have reshaped family-engagement practices, reaching millions of families across the United States, Europe, Australia, Cambodia, and Canada.

In 2008, Family Finding® was included in a federal bill, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. President Bush signed it into law, mandating family finding for every child entering foster care in the United States. In 2011, President Obama signed the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act, which included Family Finding® as an innovative strategy. Finally, in 2014, family finding was written into federal law a third time, in the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act.

In 2018, Kevin served as an expert in a successful United States Federal District Court case on behalf of parents and children forcibly separated at the U.S. border under the "zero tolerance" immigration policy — an effort that helped win relief for separated families.

Kevin is a Senior Consultant and Advisor for American health insurance companies, focusing on redefining whole person, whole family, and whole community health as something people build together, not something we receive at the doctor's or therapist's office and pharmacy. Each of us has significant abilities to shape our future health by how well we live together today. The ultimate upstream approach in protecting the safety of children is promoting the well-being of parents and families, not as the recipients of government-funded programs and services but as having the authority, resources, and freedoms to be actors and authors of our own lives.

In 2020, Kevin, Pale Blue. and the Kempe Center at the University of Denver created a Truth Telling in Child Welfare collaborative that is spreading across the United States. Young people, parents, relatives, and Tribes to share their testimony and post-traumatic wisdom about the harms of family separation and policing as a proxy for child safety in America.

Kevin's work has been featured twice on CBS 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, and in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, TIME, and dozens of other national and international publications. He continues to speak on the issues of youth and families around the world, and has published widely on the need for radical reform of child protection, children's mental health, and juvenile justice systems, and on equitable, high-quality health and mental health care.

Elizabeth Wendel, MSW, LSW, is the co-founder and president of Pale Blue. and a subject-matter expert in children's and families' work, children's and adult mental health, and healthcare. Pale Blue. honors the relational capability for justice and equity for each of us on this pale blue planet we call home.

Elizabeth is a leading expert in Family Finding® and, with Kevin Campbell, the co-author of Family Seeing® — dedicating her career to justice, side by side with young people, parents, and families. Her work began in Philadelphia, where she established the city's Family Finding program and helped more than 10,000 young people connect with over 26,000 supportive kinship and relational connections. Her impact extends to families across the United States, Australia, Romania, Mexico, Colombia, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast.

Elizabeth holds a Master's in Social Work from Temple University. During her time in graduate school, she worked in Philadelphia's only Family Finding program and with teen parents, where she devised a family networking model. Her experience as an end-of-life grief counselor in hospice gave her valuable insights into the impact of social environment on human relationships and the human condition.

Elizabeth possesses a comprehensive understanding of organizational culture and how it affects the success, morale, and learning of an organization. She has created tools to tackle "model fatigue" in large-group learning and has extensive experience in organizational culture, funding strategies, capacity building, facilitation, trauma-informed practices, and long-term support for youth in care. She is also a certified trauma-informed care expert.

Elizabeth serves as a senior advisor to two of the largest healthcare companies in the United States and provides advisory partnerships to governments and private organizations in Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Her areas of expertise include strategic design, policy framing, and practice-model development. She is a leading expert in Family Finding® and, with Kevin Campbell, the co-author of Family Seeing®, and she works across children's and adult mental health systems.

Beginning in 2020, with Pale Blue. and the Kempe Center at the University of Denver, Elizabeth co-founded the Truth Telling in Child Welfare collaborative, which is spreading across the United States — gathering the testimony and post-traumatic wisdom of young people, parents, relatives, and Tribes about the harms of family separation and of policing used as a proxy for child safety.

Elizabeth is a published author and continues to write with a focus on economic justice, health, and human wellbeing.