Kathryn Leigh Goetz, PhD
President and CEO
Founding Partner
Prior to co-founding Be Strong Families in 2012, Kathryn served as Project Director of Strengthening Families Illinois from 2004 to 2011. During this time, she also worked as a consultant with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (IDCFS), providing expertise on family-centered, strengths-based, trauma-informed practices, and early childhood initiatives. Before that, she collaborated with the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, DC, contributing to the branding and initial materials development for the national Strengthening Families Initiative. From 1991 to 2003, Kathryn held various roles within the national family support organization known as Family Resource Coalition, later renamed Family Support America, leaving as its Chief Operating Officer. (The organization was dissolved in 2005.)
Kathryn has an extensive list of publications and articles to her name, including works such as Guidelines for Family Support Practice, Pursuing the Dream: What Helps Children and Their Families Succeed, Living the Protective Factors: How Parents Keep their Children Safe and Families Strong, Living the Protective Factors Affirmation Cards, and Living the Protective Factors Playbook, The Parents Get Real Guide to Getting Your Kids Back, and What A Week: Living the Protective Factors Coloring and Activity Book, In addition, she is certified as an IPEC life coach and a 200-hour kundalini yoga teacher. Kathryn is also one of the creators of "Wake Up! to Your Potential," a transformative personal development system.
She holds a PhD in Psychology, an MA in Women’s Spirituality, and an A.B. Summa Cum Laude in Anthropology from Princeton University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the implications of a fractal epistemology for academic research in transpersonal psychology, continuing her 2020 work as a co-editor of A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology: Bridging the Personal with the Transpersonal.
Ms. Goetz is the founder (2021) of Satkona Sanctuary in Wadsworth, IL, dedicated to teaching and learning the art and crafts of sacred and sustainable wellbeing.
Kathryn has one adult son named Mengistab Tesfemariam, who she officially adopted with her ex-husband, Jonathan Wolf, in 1999. She also unofficially adopted cousins Yosef Cannon and Matthew Meyer, as adults, in 2017: they knew her son as children in the same orphanage in Ethiopia and had an unjust experience with international adoption which needed to be rectified.
“We are family.”