Ida Drury
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Impact and Evaluation
Ida Drury, PhD, MSW, has more than twenty years of experience in the human services field, primarily in public child welfare. As an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Kempe Center, she has served multiple consulting and research projects, including the Capacity Building Center for States and the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development. She currently also serves as co- principal investigator for the Kentucky Alternative Response project. Prior to joining the Kempe Center, Ida was a research and data analyst for the Colorado Department of Human Services. Before that, she guided Colorado child welfare funding as the CAPTA administrator. In 2009, she served as project director for the Colorado Consortium on Differential Response. Her early career was on the front line in Minnesota as a child welfare caseworker.
Ida’s research and expertise are centered on social work education and training, social justice and equity for family and children impacted by the child welfare system, humanizing interactions between street-level bureaucrats and citizens, and workforce development that facilitates child welfare system transformation.
Ida received her bachelor of arts and social work at Wartburg College, in Waverly, Iowa. She earned her master of social work at St. Ambrose University, in Davenport, Iowa. She completed her doctor of philosophy at the School of Public Affairs at University of Colorado Denver in 2019. For fun, Ida likes to read fiction, anthropomorphize her two Norwegian forest cats, and attend concerts and comedy shows.