Jessica Pearson founded CPR in 1981 and has been its director, cheerleader and champion since then. She has done more than 150 demonstration and research projects to improve the range and quality of public agency programs for low-income families. She pioneered the design and evaluation of strategies to make child support services more family-oriented and less punitive and did trailblazing studies on the accumulation of child support debt, the importance of parenting time, the challenges faced by survivors of domestic violence, strategies to improve worker outreach to clients, and ways to identify and address barriers to payment. In the fatherhood arena, she conducted some of the earliest studies on programs and services to promote positive father engagement in the financial and emotional lives of their children including employment programs for un and underemployed parents in the child support program. Pearson co-created and currently directs the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) which is a national clearinghouse to disseminate information about effective fatherhood practices and to identify and promote the adoption of father-supportive policies and programs at the state level. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed and practitioner journals and is co-editor of New Research on Parenting Programs for Low-Income Fathers (Routledge Press, 2021). Jessica is a policy wonk and strives to improve public programs and policies for vulnerable populations. In addition to her research at CPR, Jessica has made extensive and lasting personal commitments to extending opportunity and fairness to youth in the Denver area. In 1993, she co-founded a summer literacy program that continues to serve more than 1,000 at-risk public school elementary students per year. And in 2004, Jessica founded a mentor program in Denver’s flagship high school that has paired more than 400 adult volunteers with more than 1,000 first-generation students to help them graduate from high school and pursue post-secondary education and training.