After 22 years of dedication to Fordham, Professor Anita Lightburn has announced her retirement from the Graduate School of Social Service.
Fordham GSS held a celebration at our Westchester campus last month to honor Lightburn’s career. Friends, family, and colleagues all spoke to the group about Lightburn’s tremendous impact on our school and the profession. Lightburn also took the floor at the end of the event, giving an emotional speech about the importance and impact of social workers—and why they’re needed now more than ever.
Anita Lightburn, Ed.D.
Lightburn came to GSS in 2003, after serving for seven years as a dean and professor at Smith College’s School for Social Work in Massachusetts. In addition to her professorial duties at Fordham, Lightburn acted as the director of GSS’s Beck Institute on Religion and Poverty—an ecumenical institute that partnered with New York City interfaith religious and lay leaders to alleviate poverty.
Lightburn’s background was in both program evaluation and intervention research, and she is a founding member of the International Association of Outcome-based Evaluation and Research in Children and Family Services. Her professional interests were in community-based clinical practice, capacity building, evaluation research, and cross-national studies in children and family services.
Guests remarked on Lightburn’s profound influence on her students, which stemmed from the passion and care she showed toward their work and lives. And that influence didn’t end with her students—Lightburn’s daughter, Kara, was profiled by Fordham Now (then Fordham News) for her international humanitarian work in Haiti.
“Because of my mother, I was always surrounded by amazing, powerful women who were intellectually challenging,” she said in the article.
Fordham GSS thanks Dr. Lightburn for her commitment to human rights and social justice. She truly made Fordham better every single day of her 22-year tenure at our school. We hope retirement treats you as well as you treated us!
