2026 Awardees

2026 Promoting Excellence Award Honorees

NACC presents the Promoting Excellence Awards annually to individuals and organizations making significant contributions to the rights and well-being of children and families through excellence in legal representation.

Lily Colby is the founder and director of the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections. She leads a network of hundreds of people across disciplines who work to improve sibling connections alongside young people experiencing the foster care system. In less than two years – through training, community engagement, and legal research – Lily has elevated sibling connection as an essential topic in our field and influenced the work of lawyers, judges, social workers, CASA volunteers, and advocates for the better.

In addition to the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections, Lily Colby has also founded organizations dedicated to advocating for disability rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the rights of children experiencing foster care. Through each step of her impressive academic and professional career, Lily has gone out of her way to help improve people’s lives and protect their rights.

Lily Colby combines her legal and policy expertise with her personal lived expertise as a former youth in the system, foster parent, and kinship caregiver. Her multiple nominators noted her ability to connect with advocates in various roles and her fundamental belief in the value of every voice at the table—especially the voices of people with lived experience. Indeed, she makes sure lived experience experts are not just present but the majority in rooms where decisions happen. By practicing humility and inclusivity, she has developed a powerful leadership style that has a profound effect on the community she serves.

Lily Colby’s approach, expertise, and passion is a leading example of how to achieve an enormous, positive impact. She sets a bar that NACC hopes every advocate will aspire to. As one of her nominators wrote: “Lily Colby embodies the very best of child welfare advocacy: a leader whose work is informed not only by legal expertise and policy acumen, but also by profound lived experience, deep compassion, and an unwavering commitment to improving outcomes for children and youth impacted by foster care.” NACC is pleased to honor Lily Colby.

Sarah Roberts represents parents and children in Kenai, Alaska with empathy and solutions-oriented advocacy. Despite only practicing since 2023, Sarah operates with the skill and nuance of a seasoned attorney, and her work has earned the respect of clients, judges, attorneys, advocates, and even opposing parties.

Sarah Roberts’ many nominators noted her rare ability to simultaneously advocate zealously for her client while also having difficult conversations with them about realistic legal outcomes. She helps her clients understand what will likely happen, listens to their perspective, and communicates in a timely manner. Sarah does all this while considering the diverse cultural practices and needs of the people she represents in Alaska. In short, she has a model client-centered practice that treats every client with dignity.

Her nominators also noted her outside-the-box thinking, desire to collaborate toward solutions, and habit of treating everyone she meets with kindness and respect. As a nominator wrote: “Ms. Roberts’ advocacy is notable because she does not merely pursue her clients’ goals, interests, and needs, but does so in a way that brings constructive problem solving and resolution-focused options to the table.” Unsurprisingly, Kenai often has one of the highest rates of reunification in Alaska, in large part thanks to Sarah Roberts.

From dropping everything so she can help people who show up desperate at the courthouse, to traveling to remote parts of Alaska, Sarah Roberts’ obvious yet uncommon decency and dedication make her an excellent lawyer that NACC is pleased to honor.

One nominator’s compliment was simple, but perhaps the highest praise a lawyer can receive in their work. They wrote: “…a client who has Ms. Roberts for their attorney is being set up with the best opportunity for success.” Congratulations to Sarah Roberts, this year’s Outstanding New Lawyer.

Nyomi Davis is a law student at the University of Colorado Law School and member of the Colorado Office of the Child’s Representative Lived Experts Action Panel. Her personal experience in the child welfare system has fueled her legal career and her lifelong commitment to helping others. Since she was young, Nyomi has advocated for herself, her siblings, and other young people.

As her nominator noted, Nyomi Davis chose to pursue a career in law for the express purpose of “helping right some of the wrongs” of the system, and she has already accomplished so much. Nyomi’s work has informed how Colorado OCR interviews potential attorneys and prepares them to serve children dealing with trauma. She has developed curricula for case workers, and her advocacy has highlighted the importance of older children receiving an expressed-interest model of representation, among many contributions. Nyomi also completed the Foster Youth Internship Program and produced recommendations for congressional legislation that would support stable foster care placements and trauma-informed care and resources for youth.

Beyond her academic, legal, and advocacy work, Nyomi Davis has also volunteered to help her community, including with her church and as a tutor for students. Her nominator describes her as intelligent, wise, thoughtful, an excellent communicator, and someone who achieves her goals. Nyomi Davis overcame long odds, and her work helps make those odds not quite as long for others. Given all that she has already achieved as a law student, NACC is excited to see her impact as a lawyer. NACC is pleased to recognized Nyomi Davis as this year’s Outstanding Law Student.

25 years ago, KidsVoice was a local children’s law office in Pittsburgh with a staff of 10 and a budget of $500,000. Attorneys had enormous caseloads, and clients did not receive help with many of the legal needs that affected their lives. Thanks to the leadership of Scott Hollander and his dedicated team, KidsVoice has grown to a staff of more than 70, pioneered a multidisciplinary model of representation, and has become an influential organization not just in Pennsylvania, but nationally.

KidsVoice’s transition to a model children’s law office began – to paraphrase one nominator – when they started to tailor their programs to the needs of their clients, rather than try to fit clients into programs. Each client is now represented by a team of legal and social service professionals who work to holistically address challenges the individual faces across many aspects of their life and help them transition to adulthood.

Some of the organization’s many creative initiatives include:

• A two-generation advocacy program that helps current and former foster youth who become parents access support to address food, formula, childcare, medical, and education needs for their children. The state is disproportionately more likely to remove the children of parents who themselves were once youth in the system, but in the last seven years less than 4% of families in this KidsVoice program lost custody of their children.
• Representing transition-age youth after their dependency case closes until age 25 to address other legal issues related to: housing, disability, social security and public benefits, medical care, driver’s license suspensions, employment issues, and criminal summary offenses.
• Housing advocacy, with a full-time attorney fighting evictions and landlord-tenant issues that clients face, at the suggestion of their Youth Advisory Board. Additionally, KidsVoice partners with the Allegheny County Housing Authority to ensure former foster youth with children have priority for some of their new housing units. KidsVoice also successfully fundraised for this project and provides onsite support.
• Finally, a nurse embedded with legal staff to help address complicated medical cases, and education attorneys who represent youth long after a dependency case closes, among many multidisciplinary staff.

As one nominator wrote about KidsVoice: “They strive to provide each child the kind of full legal services that are generally reserved only for major corporations.”

From timely representation, to thorough, zealous, and holistic advocacy, KidsVoice exceeds nearly every recommendation in NACC’s Children’s Law Office Guidebook. It is a model of full legal advocacy for every aspect of a client’s life that organizations and leaders from across the country work to emulate. NACC is pleased to recognize KidsVoice as this year’s Outstanding Children’s Law Office.

For more than three decades, Tara Ford, has championed the rights of children in foster care, Indigenous children, and children with disabilities. As a lawyer, advocate, nonprofit law office founder, Stanford Law School Professor, and now Senior Counsel at Public Counsel, she leads with humility, relentlessly drives toward justice alongside the least privileged, and turns legal victories into lasting reform.

Indeed, Tara Ford led many landmark cases. These include:

• Securing housing, mental health services, and supportive placements for transition age youth in California, which led to a district court ruling that transition age youth have a constitutional right to shelter – a case that continues through appeals courts;
• Representing students and securing a first-of-its-kind decision in the Ninth Circuit that recognized Native students’ federal right to education;
• A major settlement to stop the unlawful use of restraint and seclusion on students with disabilities at a public school in California;
• Addressing excessive caseloads, foster home shortages, and delayed wellness checks in New Mexico, among other cases.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tara Ford also served as counsel of record in a Supreme Court amicus brief in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., arguing that Title IX protects all girls, women, and LGBTQIA+ athletes, and that bans undermine equal opportunity, and disproportionately harm Black and brown students and students who do not conform to traditional expectations of femininity.

Finally, Tara Ford represented NACC and 30 other organizations in a Supreme Court amicus brief in Haaland v. Brackeen, the landmark ruling that upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act, often called a gold standard in our field.

She is a leader who changed the way states handle ICWA cases and the way Indigenous children and children with disabilities access education. Simply, a large body of vital disability, education, and Indian Child Welfare law would not exist without Tara Ford.

Tara’s many nominators include state supreme court and tribal court justices, nonprofit leaders, lawyers, and former mentees. They emphasized her humility, dedication to justice, wisdom, patience, adaptability, ability to listen to and uplift the people she represents, and commitment to learning how to be even more equitable and anti-racist.

One nominator wrote: Tara’s “legal scholarship about reflecting, connecting and acting with courage towards a more just world should be required reading in every legal classroom in the country.”

Another wrote: “In each conversation I have with her, I learn about how to be a compassionate leader, how to be a courageous advocate.”

And that: “She is always willing to learn, but she is uncompromising on her values. Advancing equity and pursuing justice are not negotiable for Tara. They are the air she breathes.”

Please join NACC in honoring Tara Ford for Distinguished Achievement.

William C. Silverman and Proskauer Rose LLP have championed causes that are critical to the work of attorneys for children and the Family Court system. Through his leadership, Proskauer has become an extraordinary pro bono partner, dedicating significant legal talent and resources to advancing the rights of vulnerable children and families. NACC has had the privilege of experiencing this partnership firsthand and have witnessed the firm’s unwavering commitment to justice.

Most notably, Proskauer is serving as pro bono counsel in litigation seeking to halt the emergence of a troubling trend across the country: the development of so-called “shadow” or “hidden” foster care systems, in which children are separated from their families without the protections and oversight that accompany formal child welfare proceedings. In New York, Proskauer joined The Legal Aid Society and Lawyers for Children in litigation against New York State to protect the right to counsel for children and families impacted by these arrangements. This groundbreaking work has the potential to safeguard the rights of countless children and ensure that they are afforded the legal protections they deserve. 

Beyond litigation, Bill and Proskauer have been steadfast partners in broader advocacy efforts aimed at improving access to justice in Family Court. They have supported initiatives championed by Attorneys for Children, Advocates and the Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Families to advance equity, fairness, and meaningful access to legal representation for children and families. The firms willingness to lend not only legal expertise but also strategic vision and institutional influence has strengthened the child advocacy community and amplified efforts to create a more just and equitable Family Court system. 

Through his leadership, generosity, and unwavering commitment to public service, William Silverman exemplifies the very best of the legal profession. His work has had a profound impact on the lives of children and families and has demonstrated how meaningful partnerships between the private bar and child advocacy organizations can drive systemic change. For these reasons, he is eminently deserving of the President’s Award.