Joyce Maguire Pavao, Ed.D., LCSW, LMFT, is the founder and CEO of Center For Family Connections, Inc. (CFFC - est. 1995), Adoption Resource Center (ARC - est. 1973), Pre/Post Adoption Consulting Team (PACT - est. 1978), and Family Connections Training Institute (FACT - est. 1995), all of which are in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dr. Pavao is a Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy and is a Clinical Member of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. She is a member and past Director of the American Adoption Congress, Board member of the Kinship Alliance, Board member of the Education and Policy Board of Adoptive Families of America, and former Board member of the Open Door Society of Massachusetts. She is currently on the Practice Board of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the Editorial Board of Adoptive Families magazine, the Board of Directors of the Home For Little Wanderers, and the Adoption Advisory Board of the Child Welfare League of America. Dr. Pavao has received many awards and honors, including the North American Council for Adoptable Children award for Child Advocate of the Year and Adoption Activist, the Baran/Pannor award for Excellence in Open Adoption, and the Congressional Coalition on Adoption award for Angels in Adoption 2000, as nominated by Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman Mike Capuano.
Dr. Pavao has done extensive training, both nationally and internationally. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has lectured at Harvard, Smith, Wellesley, UCLA, USC and Antioch, among other universities. She has consulted various public and private child welfare agencies, adoption agencies, schools, community groups, probate and family court judges, lawyers, and clergy. She has also worked closely with individuals, couples, and families on issues related to adoption, foster care, guardianship and kinship, as well as complex families formed through reproductive technology, single parent families, gay and lesbian families, and families through remarriage.
Her constant chant is that adoption is about finding families for children, not about finding children for families. Although she is a family therapist with empathy for all parties, she keeps her focus on the best interests of the child. Her other mantra is that it takes a community to hold a family and the wider community needs to understand the Family of Adoption.
She has developed models for treatment and for training using her systemic, intergenerational, and developmental framework The Normative Crises in the Development of the Adoptive Family (Family Therapy News, 1982) and her book The Family of Adoption (Beacon Press, 1998) has received high acclaim. Additionally, she is a contributing writer to Clinical Practice Issues in Adoption: Bridging the Gap Between Adoptees Placed as Infants and as Older Children, Groza and Rosenberg, ed. (Praeger Press, 1998), Creating Kinship, Roszia, Baran and Coleman, ed. (National Child Welfare Resource Center, 1997), Adoption Healing, Sprenger, ed. (New Zealand Adoption Trust, 1997), and Post Adoption Services: Emerging Themes, Issues and Interventions (Casey Family Services, 1995).
She states that more than her degrees and honors, her most valuable credential is that she has experienced life as an adopted person and that she has great love and respect for both her birth and adoptive families.