Mary Bissell

Mary Bissell is an attorney, child and family policy expert and founding partner of ChildFocus.  She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.   Mary has worked as a legislative Assistant for U.S. Senator John D. Rockefeller and was formerly a Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute that brings new voices and ideas to America’s public discourse.  She also served as a senior staff attorney and lobbyist at the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) where she focused on poverty, child welfare, substance abuse, domestic violence, and mental health policy issues. Mary began her career as the Equal Justice Works/Crowell & Moring Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia where she started the nation’s first legal services program exclusively for grandparents and other relative caregivers.