Executive Director
Chris Newlin, MS LPC, has been the Executive Director of the National Children's Advocacy Center since July 2005. He is responsible for providing leadership and management of NCAC and participating in national and international leadership activities regarding the protection of children. The NCAC was the first Child Advocacy Center in the United States, and continues to provide both prevention and intervention services for child abuse in Huntsville/Madison County, and also houses the NCAC National Training Center, the Southern Regional CAC, and the Child Abuse Library Online (CALiO). In these capacities, Chris oversees a staff of 45 professionals and a yearly budget of 4.8 million dollars. Chris is a Board Member of the Alabama Network of Children's Advocacy Centers, an ad hoc Board Member for the National Children's Alliance, a member of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, and a Clinical Member of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. He is also the former Training Faculty Coordinator for Finding Words Georgia and a training faculty member of the National Children's Advocacy Center's Forensic Interviewing Training Program. Chris has presented at numerous local, regional, national and international conferences; and recent areas of interest are the international development of the Child Advocacy Center model and the dissemination and utilization of child maltreatment research to improve frontline practice. Chris graduated from Hendrix College, the University of Central Arkansas, and the Harvard Business School Executive Education Program.
Prior to coming to the NCAC, Chris was the Executive/Clinical Director of Harbor House, the Northwest Georgia Child Advocacy Center in Rome, GA, from 1999-2005. During his tenure at Harbor House, the agency increased its service area to encompass seven counties in Northwest Georgia with a population of 420,000; created a satellite office, the Paulding Child Advocacy Center, in Dallas; and was cited by the NCA for developing innovative technology for use at the CAC and in multidisciplinary team meetings. In addition to his Executive Director duties, he conducted forensic interviews with children from multiple judicial circuits, led the multidisciplinary teams in two judicial circuits was a former board member of the Georgia Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and former President of the Children's Advocacy Centers of Georgia. Chris also served as a Counselor/Forensic Interviewer at Children's Advocacy Services of Greater St. Louis. His responsibilities included providing therapy for sexually abused children and children exposed to domestic violence, and conducting forensic interviews with children regarding allegations of sexual abuse. In addition, he developed and implemented a comprehensive treatment program for juveniles with sexual behavior problems for the St. Charles County Family Court.
Additional prior experience includes employment as a Clinical Therapist at Youth Home, a residential treatment program for adolescent males, many of whom were victims of child maltreatment; and, Therapist/Research Assistant at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences/Arkansas Children's Hospital – Family Treatment Program, a specialized treatment program for incestuous families where he provided therapy services for sexually abused children, their non-abused siblings, non-offending parents, and incest offenders. Additionally, he provided outpatient treatment for adolescents with sexual behavior problems and conducted extensive assessment of child maltreatment victims as a Research Assistant in “A Psychophysiological Study of Abused Children”, a five-year NIMH funded study which evaluated the impact of child maltreatment on children's psychophysiology.