Congratulating and Thanking Belinda Caldwell

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F.E.A.S.T.'s Board of Directors and the parent community are extending our gratitude and best wishes to our Executive Director, Belinda Caldwell, as she steps down from the role to focus on rolling out a new F.E.A.S.T. website next month. The project will update, streamline, and modernize our face to the world and our services to the parent community.

Belinda has been serving as our Executive Director since November of 2016 when Leah Dean passed the baton to her. During her tenure, Belinda has balanced her work at F.E.A.S.T. with her position at  Victorian Centre of Excellence in Eating Disorders (CEED) as a Carer Consultant and Project Manager, and as a founder  and Director and Deputy Chair of Eating Disorders Families Australia. We are grateful for her service, and looking forward to her continued service on the board of directors. Among the achievements of her time leading the organization are increased membership, donations, and events. We are grateful for her professionalism and focus on education as well as our increased visibility and profile with the professional eating disorder treatment and research community. As our first staff member with both clinical and personal family lived experience with eating disorders, we have benefited from Belinda's ability to see the clinical context at the same time she sees the family context: which fits our mission as an organization to support treatment that includes families.

As Belinda steps over to focus on the website design and deployment, Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh will move from her one-day a week role as Outreach Director to full-time employment as CEO. This will be the first time F.E.A.S.T. has employed paid full-time staff and is made possible by a generous new grant just for that purpose. The F.E.A.S.T. board voted to accept the grant after a historic strategic planning day in Chicago in April also funded by a restricted grant for that purpose and facilitated by Elissa Myers of Drohan Management.

This is a time of momentum and focus for the organization. We are committed to serving the community of parents supporting loved ones with eating disorders. Our advocacy for families and evidence-based treatment is bearing fruit all over the world, and as our voice grows so do the voices of the families we represent.

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