After eight years leading New Jersey’s child welfare system, Christine Norbut Beyer is joining the national nonprofit Think of Us to help develop AI-collaborative resource navigation for youth and families.
Norbut Beyer will serve as an “executive in residence” with the 11-year-old organization, which seeks to use lived experience, research and technology to improve the child welfare system.
“This organization is leading the way in reimagining how we support children and families, moving upstream to prevention and leveraging innovation to meet people where they are,” Norbut Beyer said, in a statement announcing the hire.
She was tapped in 2018 by former Gov. Phil Murphy to lead New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), returning to the agency where she had already served as an assistant commissioner before working for Casey Family Programs.
During her tenure, New Jersey finally exited from federal oversight stemming from a class action lawsuit filed in the 1990s. She discussed the end of that case with The Imprint Weekly Podcast in 2023.
Norbut Beyer will lead Think of Us’ work on Connect Me, which it describes as a practice model “designed to test how AI can be used not as a tool but as a full collaborator in resource navigation.”
“I look forward to advancing resource navigation and working alongside partners to build systems that are truly responsive and grounded in community voice,” she said.
Norbut Beyer will be succeeded at the Department of Children and Families by Joseph Ribsam, who led New Hampshire’s child welfare system for nearly six years before stepping down in 2023 and joining the Annie E. Casey Foundation as director for child welfare and juvenile justice policy. Like his predecessor, Ribsam is also coming home to DCF: he spent seven years with the agency between 2010 and 2017.
