December 4, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
New job: Susan Dreyfus, 54, starts January 3 as the new chief executive of Families International, the Milwaukee parent of three national social-service nonprofits (including the 100-year-old Alliance for Children and Families, an advocacy group) and a for-profit company, FEI Behavioral Health.
About her predecessor: Ms. Dreyfus will succeed Peter Goldberg, who led the group for 17 years until he died in August.
Background: Ms. Dreyfus rejoins Families International after having served as its senior vice president from 2003 to 2007. Since 2009, she has been secretary of Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services. Before that, she was executive vice president for strategy at Rogers Behavioral Health Systems, a Wisconsin multiservice nonprofit health-care provider. Ms. Dreyfus has also served as an administrator of Wisconsin’s Division of Children and Family Services.
Her goals: She wants to help Families International build more ties with other nonprofit social-service organizations and with government agencies, to decrease poverty in America, improve the health of poor people, and increase their success in education and employment.
Challenges she anticipates: Filling the shoes of a man she calls her mentor, Mr. Goldberg, an influential nonprofit leader (and frequent Chronicle contributor). “Part of my challenge coming in is honoring the past, but moving this organization into the future,” Ms. Dreyfus says. “Peter would want me to do that. But it will be a challenge. He was a legend in his own right.”
Education: She holds a bachelor’s degree in business management from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay.
What she’s reading: Besides issues of Health Affairs policy journal, she just finished The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer, and is in the middle of Hometown, by Tracy Kidder.
