Michelle Morrison

With more than 25 years of experience in nonprofit leadership, strategy development, program design, national scaling and winning the Illinois NASW’s Social Worker of the Year award, Michelle Adler Morrison champions Youth Guidance’s mission to help youth in under-resourced communities overcome obstacles, focus on their education and succeed in school and life. Her expertise includes child and adolescent growth and development, youth mental health, resiliency, parent and family engagement, educational reform and scaling evidence-based approaches to addressing youth violence and trauma. Under her direction, the agency has significantly expanded its programs in Chicago to serve thousands of youth people and garnered national support to bring the organization’s evidence-based BAM and WOW programs to youth in Waukegan, Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and London.

She is a firm believer in uplifting youth voice and creating innovative and healing centered approaches that unleash the potential of youth and engage caring adults to support them on their journey. Adler Morrison holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree in social work from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

For more information about Youth Guidance’s work to provide school-based cognitive behavioral interventions (CBI) curricula with training, please visit the Youth Guidance website. This includes the evidence-based BAM (Becoming a Man) and WOW (Working on Womanhood) programs, as well as the evidence-informed EVOLVE curricula.