After graduating in 1996 with a PhD in HDFS, Lenette Azzi-Lessing continued her leadership as Executive Director of Children’s Friend, a child-and-family-serving organization in Rhode Island. She and her team built a broad range of services to meet the needs of marginalized children and families, particularly those in poverty. During her time there they developed one of the nation’s first programs for child-welfare-involved families affected by parental substance use and Rhode Island’s first comprehensive family support center. Under Dr. Azzi-Lessing’s leadership, Children’s Friend also pioneered an organizational equity and inclusion initiative to support its antiracist, anti-oppressive approach to service delivery.
In 2007, Dr. Azzi-Lessing left agency work to accept a faculty position in the Master of Social Work (MSW) program at Wheelock College in Boston, where she became a tenured, full professor. She founded Wheelock’s Graduate Certificate Program in Early Childhood Mental Health and served as faculty leader of Wheelock’s partnership with the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in South Africa to promote the wellbeing of young children and their families. Her work with UFH included co-conducting a community assessment and co-developing a Graduate Certificate Program in Early Childhood Development and Family Support in the South African Context.
In 2018, Dr. Azzi-Lessing joined Boston University (BU) School of Social Work. She serves as department chair and coordinator of the school’s Specialization in Children, Youth, and Families. Building on her relationships with the South African early childhood development community, Dr. Azzi-Lessing initiated a partnership between BU and the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, focused on preventing violence against young children in South Africa and other low-and-middle-income countries. This work engages experts from the Global South, including community members with lived experience, to identify effective violence-prevention strategies.
Dr. Azzi-Lessing is a Senior Fellow at the Child Welfare League of America and a founding member of its Research Equity Committee. She is the author of numerous publications, including the book, “Behind from the Start: How America’s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children.”
Dr. Azzi-Lessing notes that her learning at UConn School of Family Studies (now HDFS) was the ideal complement to her social work education, enabling her to leverage a deep understanding of child and family development in fighting the systemic inequities that threaten the life chances of millions of children in the U.S. and globally.