Alumni
On Nov. 16, 2023, members of the University Pittsburgh School of Social Work community gathered to celebrate the newest group of alumni award recipients. Following opening remarks from Dean Betsy Farmer, Katy Gallmeyer, the school’s director of development, announced the 2023 honorees. After the presentation of awards, Yodit Betru, director of the MSW program and clinical associate professor, led the recipients in a discussion about their work and the pathways they’ve taken since graduating. It was an incredible event and a great opportunity to bring our community together for a night of celebration around not only the amazing work our alumni are doing but also the friends, mentors, and communities they’ve made along the way.
Congratulations again to our 2023 Alumni Award recipients!
Social Work Education
Mary Elizabeth Rauktis (PhD ’93)
Research Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work
Mary Elizabeth Rauktis is a 1993 graduate of the doctoral program at Pitt Social Work and was thrilled to come back in 2007 following her career working in local governments and nonprofits. At Pitt Social Work, she teaches at the BASW and MSW levels. Her research has focused on out-of-home care (foster care) in the United States, Europe, and India, and in the past five years, she has begun to examine human and nonhuman relationships in her work on pets in families.
She was a Fulbright scholar in Portugal in 2017 and a Fulbright specialist in India in 2022. Rauktis is an associate editor of the journal Social Work in Mental Health and serves on the editorial boards of four other journals. She has also co-edited four special issues of journals focusing on humans and animals, child safety in care, and issues supporting new researchers at her Fulbright universities. She chairs the Fulbright Association Greater Pittsburgh Area Chapter. She is currently coediting a book with her colleagues at Assam Don Bosco University on service learning in Indian universities.
Social Work Leadership
Yanti Kusumawardhani, (MSW ’05)
Child Protection Advisor, Save the Children Indonesia
Yanti Kusumawardhani received her Master of Social Work and completed a certificate in children, youth, and families at Pitt in 2005. After graduation, she consulted on numerous projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 2013, Kusumawardhani joined Save the Children Indonesia as a staff member for child protection programs. She has held numerous positions at Save the Children and currently serves as a child protection advisor. Over her career, she has worked with dozens of social workers and reached thousands of vulnerable children.
Kusumawardhani holds international accreditation in child protection from The Council for Awards in Care, Health and Education. In 2015, she was the first winner of Most Talented Social Worker awarded by the Ministry of Social Affairs of Indonesia, and in 2017, she was valedictorian of the Social Service Leadership Program at the National University of Singapore. In 2019, Kusumawardhani was named to the board of the Indonesian Association of Social Workers. She is currently Indonesia’s representative on Children’s Rights for the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children.
Social Work Leadership
Jeffrey Bolton (MSW ’79)
Retired Chief Administrative Officer, Mayo Clinic
Jeffrey Bolton currently provides health care and business development consulting services to organizations and corporations and serves on several boards. Prior to his consulting business, he served as the chief administrative officer of Mayo Clinic from 2013 until his retirement in 2021. In that role, he was responsible for leading a workforce of more than 76,000 who cared for more than 1.3 million unique patients each year from all 50 states and nearly 130 countries.
As chief administrative officer, he led Mayo Clinic’s administrative functions for clinical and hospital operations; education and research activities; the Mayo Clinic Platform and international businesses; and enterprise shared services, including business development, the Center for Digital Health, finance, facilities, human resources, information technology, marketing, philanthropy, public affairs, risk management, and strategy. He was a member of the Mayo Clinic board of trustees from 2011 to 2021. Prior to his role as chief administrative officer, he served as Mayo Clinic’s chief financial officer from 2002 to 2013.
Prior to joining Mayo Clinic, Bolton held various business and finance positions at Carnegie Mellon University, including chief financial officer and vice president of business and planning. Bolton has a bachelor’s degree from Pennsylvania State University and master’s degrees in social work and business administration, both from the University of Pittsburgh.
Social Work Practice
Lisa Freeman (BASW ’02, MSW ’04)
Founder and Owner, Freeman Family Farm & Greenhouse
Lisa Freeman received her bachelor’s degree in social work in 2002 and proceeded to earn joint master’s degrees in social work and public administration, concentrating in direct practice and urban and regional affairs. After graduation, she worked alongside former mayor of Braddock John Fetterman at Turtle Creek Valley Community Services., to address the homicide rate in Braddock, Pennsylvania. She continued working in at-risk communities with agencies like the Salvation Army; Project Destiny, Inc. Of Pittsburgh; the Center for Family Excellence; and the Weed and See initiative in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.
Combining her knowledge as a social worker, passion for helping the disenfranchised, and affinity for her North Side community, in 2011, Freeman founded Manchester Growing Together Farm. Since then, the farm has grown to become a community hub, providing an outdoor learning space for children; jobs; volunteer opportunities for those with intellectual disabilities; and at its core, a reliable site for healthy and fresh food for under-resourced individuals and families. In 2022, Freeman received a $175,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through its Healthy Food Financing Initiative. She used this funding to build a market that will soon offer farm-to-table meals, health services, exercise classes, and other programming along with fresh organic food. While Freeman will say that she just thoroughly enjoys playing in the dirt, her neighbors will insist that she has been a catalyst for community building and combating food insecurity in the North Side’s Manchester neighborhood.
Freeman recently was appointed to the Pennsylvania Farm Service Agency State Committee to support farmers across the commonwealth. She also is a member of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council.
Advancing Excellence Award
David Wilkes (MSW ’11)
Director of International Programs, Tutapona
David Wilkes has more than 20 years of experience implementing programs to support vulnerable populations around the globe. As director of international programs at Tutapona, Wilkes oversees the implementation of mental health services to facilitate the emotional healing of those impacted by war and conflict.
Wilkes served as the lead author of the Heroes Journey, a post-traumatic growth curriculum to support children impacted by war, which has been used to facilitate healing for thousands of children traumatized by conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Ethiopia; by ISIS terrorist attacks on Kurdish and Yazidi people; and by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was instrumental in a number of other innovations, such as the development of Healthy Habits, an addiction program to support the refugee community in Uganda; the initiation of an online training program equipping the social service workforce of East Africa in trauma and adversity interventions; and the establishment of numerous program partnerships that have improved mental health service and collaborations with health, education, and livelihood specialists serving refugee communities.
Wilkes’ previous experience includes providing support services for a range of vulnerable and marginalized groups, including widows and orphans forcefully evicted from their homes, dual-diagnosis homeless populations, trafficked and prostituted women, and children orphaned by war and HIV.
2023 School of Social Work Alumni Award Recipients
On Nov. 16, 2023, members of the University Pittsburgh School of Social Work community gathered to celebrate the newest group of alumni award recipients. Following opening remarks from Dean Betsy Farmer, Katy Gallmeyer, the school’s director of development, announced the 2023 honorees. After the presentation of awards, Yodit Betru, director of the MSW program and clinical associate professor, led the recipients in a discussion about their work and the pathways they’ve taken since graduating. It was an incredible event and a great opportunity to bring our community together for a night of celebration around not only the amazing work our alumni are doing but also the friends, mentors, and communities they’ve made along the way.
School of Social Work Service Award
Ke’amber Kord (msw ’20)
Lead Trauma Teacher, Beloved U
Ke’Amber Ford is a wellness consultant helping organizations to create healing spaces through trauma recovery education. Ford has 14 years of experience working in K-12 educational spaces, universities, community third spaces, corporate organizations, rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and the criminal justice system. She is well versed in trauma and attachment, developmental psychology, behavior analysis, socioemotional learning, instructional design, and program evaluation.
Before specializing in trauma, Ford completed her bachelor’s degree in human learning and development, with specializations in educational psychology and counseling, at Georgia State University. She went on to teach before pursuing her Master of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh and becoming a licensed social worker.
Ford operates Beloved U, a wellness community supporting leaders in recognizing, responding to, and recovering from trauma exposures. Ford is chair of the Pitt Social Work Alumni Council and the Pitt Social Work representative to the Pitt Alumni Association.
School of Social Work Service Award
Genafie Mcknight (BASW ’09, MSW ’15)
Founder and Lead Clinician, GSM Therapeutics and Consulting Services
Genafie Mcknight received her bachelor’s degree from Pitt Social Work in 2009. Afterwards, she worked in the Office of Children, Youth and Families at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services for six years before returning to Pitt for her master’s degree. Postgraduation, Mcknight remained employed in child welfare and provided mobile therapy services until 2020. She went on to found GSM Therapeutics and Consulting Services, through which she offers individual, couples, and group therapy. Her passion for the child welfare population moved her to pursue a contract with Allegheny County to provide mental health treatment, coached visitation, and trauma-informed eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy at GSM.
Mcknight is pursuing a doctoral degree at La Roche University to become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Currently, she also is developing a holistic therapeutic resort center called GSM Holistic Houses of Healing, where high-risk youths who are in the custody of child protective services can receive individualized, holistic, and culturally informed and trauma-informed treatment. On top of all this, McKnight has served as a field instructor at the School of Social Work for the past two years.