Kevin Ryan (born 1967), is a lawyer and champion for the protection of homeless children and youth, who serves as the President of Covenant House International, which is one of the largest charities serving homeless, trafficked and sexually exploited youth in the Americas.[1] After receiving his law degree from the Georgetown Law Center in 1992, Ryan started a legal aid program for homeless youth at Covenant House in New York City, which aids runaways, homeless youth, and “throwaways,” children and teens who are rejected by their families. He saw children prostituting themselves for drug money, or living in train tunnels." [2] - From 2003 to 2006, he served as New Jersey's first Child Advocate where he exposed a series of high-profile failings in the State juvenile justice system, including the illegal detention of hundreds of children awaiting mental health care.[3][4] Ryan brought to public light conditions of dangerous overcrowding in a number of youth detention centers, including the jailing in small, crowded cells of nonviolent youth, such as runaways, with violent offenders, sparking a rash of suicide attempts among detained young people.[5] As Child Advocate, he also investigated the role the government played in placing and supervising four young boys in the care of an adoptive family who later starved them, leading to a wave of national attention and a call for meaningful reform of the New Jersey child welfare system.[6]
His advocacy on behalf of children in the foster care system before the United States Congress and on the CBS television show 60 Minutes brought renewed national attention to the need for reform of those systems.[7][8]
In 2006, he left his position as Child Advocate at the invitation of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine to lead a turnaround of the statewide child welfare system as New Jersey's first commissioner of the Department of Children and Families which runs the Division of Youth and Family Services.[9][10] He left government in 2008, widely praised for having stabilized a child welfare system that had been in crisis and laying a strong foundation for systemwide change.[11][12] In his farewell address to the State Legislature in January 2010, outgoing Governor Jon Corzine said his administration had taken one of the country's worst child welfare systems "and made it among the best."[13]
In 2009, Ryan was named the first lay president of Covenant House International.[14] He described it as "coming home," referencing the decade he had worked as a lawyer for homeless youth at Covenant House from 1992 to 2002.[15]
Covenant House is the largest privately-funded agency in the Americas providing shelter, food, immediate crisis care, and an array of other services to homeless, throwaway and runaway youth. In addition to basic needs, Covenant House provides a continuum of care to homeless youth aged 16-21 designed to transition them into an independent adulthood, free from the risk of future homelessness. Covenant House offers services including healthcare, educational support/GED preparation/college scholarships, job readiness and skills training programs, drug abuse treatment and prevention programs, legal services, mental health services, mother/child programs, transitional living programs, street outreach and aftercare.
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Born on an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, Kevin Ryan moved to South Amboy, NJ, where he was raised, when he was a year old. He lived at first with his mother, Eileen, who awaited the return of his father, Jim, from the Vietnam War.[16] He is the oldest of 6 brothers, all raised in South Amboy.[17]
He attended and graduated from The Catholic University of America (1989), Georgetown University Law Center (1992) and received a Masters of Law degree from New York University Law School (2000). He married the former Clare Neitzey whom he met as an undergraduate student at Catholic University. They have six children: three sons and three daughters. In 1997, after having worked with street youth for five years at Covenant House in New York City, Ryan was hand-picked by Sr. Mary Rose McGeady, then president of Covenant House International, to join her in Washington D.C. to advocate against passage of a 1997 federal juvenile crime bill that would have allowed states to incarcerate truants, runaways and curfew-violators with adult criminals.[18] The pair later shared the national Youth Advocates of the Year award from the National Network for Youth in Washington, D.C. in recognition of their successful efforts to protect non-violent runaway youth from secure detention with violent adult offenders.[19] Ryan deflected the praise and attributed their victory to his boss, Sister Mary Rose McGeady, who fought alongside him. “She could have run the Teamsters Union, she was so tough,” Ryan remembered.[20]
- While still with Covenant House, he co-wrote the New Jersey Homeless Youth Act with homeless advocate Lisa Eisenbud, signed into law by Gov. Christie Whitman in 1999. The act allocated $1.5 million for the creation of new beds in homeless shelters, and allowed children in crisis access to these beds, while the agency tried to contact their parents or the child welfare system. Previously, children could not stay in a shelter without the permission of their parents or a judge.[21]
- - His appointment by Governor Jon Corzine in 2006 to serve in the cabinet and lead the reform of the state foster care system came after several high profile lapses in the child welfare system, many of which Ryan had brought to public light as Child Advocate.[22][23] He resigned in 2008 to oversee philanthropic work in Newark, New Jersey and Africa by the foundation created by Raymond Chambers.[24] Ryan helped Chambers launch a new United Nations program designed to eradicate deaths due to malaria following Chambers appointment as the United Nations Secretary Generals' Envoy for Malaria.[25][26]
- - In January 2009, Covenant House announced that Ryan would become its 4th president since the organization's founding in 1972, and the first who is not a member of a Roman Catholic religious order.[27] He is the recipient of Harvard Law School's Wassertstein Fellowship,[28] the Skadden Fellowship,[29] the Vatican Mission to the United Nations Path to Peace Award,[30] and several honorary degrees, including from Georgian Court University, where he delivered the commencement address 86 years after his paternal grandmother graduated valedictorian in the university's first campus graduation in Lakewood, New Jersey.[31][32]
In November 2010 he led a team of 50 runners in the New York City Marathon who raced on behalf of homeless children and Covenant House.[33]
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