Professor Khushnuma Cooper
Dr. Cooper teaches ‘Being a Leader: An Ontological Phenomenological Approach’ and ‘Public Policy for Children and Youth’ at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. She received her MSW and PhD in Social Work from Luskin. As a social entrepreneur and specialist in the study and implementation of what’s next for human services, Dr. Cooper uses long-standing relationships with policy-makers, leading practitioners, and consumers to shield and guide California’s organizations, both public and private, through reform initiatives. Starting out as a group home child care worker, she has held the positions of house manager, foster care social worker, non-public school teacher, FFA Director, and Director of Research and Quality at the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services.
Her firm, Khush Cooper and Associates, is currently conducting the first ever LGBTQ Youth Preparedness Scan for LA County which assesses all 11 county departments’ capacity to properly serve LGBTQ children, youth and families in order to prevent future disproportionality of these youth in the child welfare system. KC&A also currently developing an e-learning platform, Implematix, to support foster care providers with AB 403 implementation. Other projects have included inventing a practical and staff-friendly system for performance management for foster care providers in California, initiating two of the multi-million dollar federal Permanency Innovations Initiative grants in the country (the RISE Project, CAPP), and managing the implementation of three of the five state-wide Residentially Based Services (RBS) demonstration projects in California. She is a founding board member of the LA LGBT Child Abuse Prevention Council and consults on a local, state and national level in the area of LGBT youth in systems.