Brittany Walker Pettigrew, MSW, LCSW

Brittany Walker Pettigrew, MSW, LCSW, is a more than 20-year veteran of the Alameda County Department of Children and Family Services in California. where she is a Program Manager.

Ms. Walker Pettigrew continues to be grateful for the experience gained in a career that has touched every part of the child welfare system, from managing the Child Abuse Reporting Hotline, to supporting families through the reunification process, to matching special needs children for adoption.

As a Program Manager for the last several years, Ms. Walker Pettigrew has prioritized creating and supporting an organizational culture that seeks to dismantle the effects of institutional racism and oppression, and allows for staff to provide humble, thoughtful and socially just service to families striving to recover from the crisis of child maltreatment.

Ms. Walker Pettigrew has developed programs that cater specifically to the unique needs of kin caregivers, pioneered Team Decision Making in the county, become well-versed in the needs of commercially sexual exploited children, and lead a joint task team between Social Services, Probation, Courts and service providers in developing a model for serving youth who interface with those systems.

Ms. Walker Pettigrew helped lead a team that developed a ground breaking Equity and Inclusion Fellowship, that over the course of 8 intensive modules, teaches participants about the ways in which white supremacy culture shows up in child welfare and how they can enact the antidotes to mitigate the effects of systemic oppression. 

Ms. Walker Pettigrew, a California native, has been engaged in cross-cultural dialogue with women from Alabama, since 2016, for the purposes of gaining understanding across those differences. She has been hired to facilitate similar dialogue for large groups on the issue of Guns in America.