The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund in San Francisco is pleased to welcome Stewart Wakeling as its new Senior Program Officer for Strengthening Families.

Wakeling will direct the Fund’s multi-generational approach to strengthening families in the San Francisco Bay Area, including helping parents and families advance economically and preparing children to succeed in school.

Wakeling has a 20-year career focused on youth and family issues, including juvenile justice, child protection, community violence, and the development of related policy, programs and research.

As the former executive director of the Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin, CA, Wakeling created a successful county collaborative that operated family resource centers devoted to improving economic and education opportunities for low-income children and families. He also created “Operation Peacekeeper,” a strategic partnership among local law enforcement and social service agencies focused on gun and gang-related violence that reduced youth homicide by 80 percent in five years. Before that, Wakeling was a senior researcher at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he worked on community approaches to justice and preventing child abuse and neglect. He has also worked in New York and Boston on several community-based human service initiatives.

Wakeling received his Bachelor of Arts in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Masters in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.