Dr. Jana Hunsley - Executive Director

Jana’s work began as a Child & Family-Based Case Manager offering support to biological parents whose children were removed from their care by CPS. Since then, she has worked to meet the needs of children and adolescents in various settings, including residential treatment, institutional care, schools, juvenile detention, post-adoption, home visiting, and outpatient counseling.

After working as a post-adoption therapist for a few years, Jana decided to go back to school to pursue a PhD in experimental psychology. Her research in her PhD program began with a focus on studying adoptive siblings (the other children in the family who do not have the most externalizing trauma-related behaviors), which led her to dive into the literature to better understand the experience of each family member. In her research, Jana recognized the importance of supporting the whole family system, rather than just focusing on the trauma-related needs of the adopted child, in order for lasting change to occur. In her PhD program, she also created trauma-informed interventions to meet the needs of the whole family, including co-creating a therapeutic family camp called Hope Connection 2.0 and creating an online, self-paced post-adoption family intervention called the Connected Family Series.

Dr. Jana Hunsley is an LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker), psychologist, TBRI Practitioner, and advocate for families in the adoption and foster care community. Jana received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development (KPICD) at Texas Christian University (TCU). She has written and spoken for the National Council for Adoption, the North American Council on Adoptable Children, Show Hope’s Hope for the Journey Conference, and more. She was also a professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Jana’s work focuses on understanding and meeting the needs of every member of the adoptive and foster family. She has counseled, studied, taught, trained, created, and researched foster and adoptive families for years. Taking what she’s learned, she’s developed a new model that has proven effective for meeting the needs and improving the quality of life for foster and adoptive families.

In her research, Jana recognized the importance of supporting the whole family system, rather than just focusing on the trauma-related needs of the adopted child, in order for lasting change to occur.

In addition to her Ph.D., Jana has a Master of Science in experimental psychology from TCU, a Master of Arts in social service administration from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Indiana Wesleyan University.

Jana’s passion for this work began when her family adopted her three brothers from Taiwan when she was 16 years old. Her world was flipped upside down, and she became immersed in the realities of trauma and adoption. When she was 18, her family adopted her two brothers and sister from Ethiopia, and she knew then that she wanted to become a therapist to help children who had experienced trauma. When she was 20, her family adopted her seventh brother who is from Ghana, and she recognized her experiences had taught her important lessons that could help other adoptive families.