Leah van Lingen

MSW

Ms. van Lingen has worked for the County of San Diego’s Child Welfare Services since 2000. Prior to that, she worked for 4 years in a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed (SED) foster children. She led a team of care providers and also taught recreational therapy classes (dance, piano, singing and acting). In her role at the County, she has worked as a social worker in emergency response, continuing services and as a Court Officer. Ms. van Lingen spent most of her case carrying years in the Medically Fragile and Deaf specialty units. Children in those units are not only abused but also have a medical condition that creates great complexity in the children’s cases (e.g. can a parent not only safely re-unify but also understand and address their child’s serious and unique needs? Additionally, many medically fragile children are non-verbal which makes investigations of this vulnerable population quite complex).
 

Ms. van Lingen then thrived for 10 years as the County’s Legal Procedures Liaison and Policy Analyst. In this role, she wrote and analyzed child welfare policy ensuring it aligned with state and federal mandates. She also provided direction on confidentiality of records and compiled the responses to lawsuits against the County for child abuse related matters.
 

Since 2015 she has stepped outside of child welfare and held management roles in other County departments. Here she has expanded her public service in working with electronic health records and behavioral health project management.
 

Ms. van Lingen completed her undergraduate work at UCSD with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Additionally, she earned her Masters in Social Work at SDSU. Ms. van Lingen is also a fellow of Georgetown University, through their Center for Juvenile Justice Reform. She holds three certifications from Georgetown for Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Multi-System Integration, Information Sharing and School Partnerships.
 

Her capstone projects included early childhood interventions as a strategy to help reduce the number of children who move from the foster care system into the juvenile delinquency system. Another project was addressing the complex confidentiality laws and cross over rules between Child Welfare and the many entities that Child Welfare collaborates with (schools, other courts, law enforcement, etc.). The information sharing project successfully simplified the understanding of various confidentiality laws so that agencies can work together more efficiently. Tools were also put into place that affirmed existing information sharing laws in an easy-to-access format that all partners could understand. In February of 2014, Georgetown University announced Ms. van Lingen’s Early Childhood project as winner of the 2013 Project of the year. Ms. van Lingen’s project was selected from amongst 400 other nationwide fellows’ projects. This award recognizes projects that have made significant impacts and positive progress for children.
 

Ms. van Lingen has trained a variety of audiences from social workers to attorneys to CASA volunteers. She greatly enjoys training and sharing her field experiences so that others can grow. She is known for her engagement, for shedding light on grey topics for aiding learning with humor.