Gerry Costa has been a guiding light in my work over the past 20+ years.  He’s been a dear and trusted teacher, mentor, supervisor, and collaborative colleague who has honored me by writing the Foreword to my recently published book. 

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Gerry provided an institutional home to my first grant-funded program for drug-exposed babies and continued to shape, grow, and mentor that program throughout the years.  With always gentle but supportive guidance, he challenged and inspired me, in ways that I would not have dreamed possible, to expand the scope and reach of that program to include an even wider population of at-risk and underserved children and families.  I am deeply grateful for the way Gerry both valued and incorporated the perspective that my work brought (long before it became mainstream) to his multi-disciplinary team.  

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As a teacher and lecturer, Gerry never ceases to inspire!  His every presentation, even those I have heard in other forms before, is fresh and new as he continuously integrates the most relevant and timely research across multiple disciplines and imbues each topic with his unique passion, compassion, and deep understanding of the human heart and humanity.  Gerry brings a distinctively deep and caring warmth to his teaching, a warmth that engages and challenges us all to think more deeply about the nature and power of human relationships with the children and families with whom we work with and for ourselves.

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I’ve been blessed to watch Gerry at work as he remarkably builds bridges locally, nationally, and internationally and ceaselessly works to make a tangibly better world for both professionals and the children and families they serve, but especially for those families most in need.