Work & Family Life

The Work & Family Life newsletter was launched in 1987 by Susan Ginsberg, Ed.D., and Ellen Galinsky, M.S., nationally recognized educators with extensive experience conducting research and working with employees and companies on work/life issues.

"In the early 1980s, we gave lunchtime seminars on work and family life at companies such as Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Time, Inc., Philip Morris, American Express, AT&T, and Colgate-Palmolive," says Dr. Ginsberg. Our seminars were on topics that included:

"The overwhelmingly positive response on the part of both employers and employees was our impetus to launch a newsletter that would cover a similar range of topics and at the same time be accessible to a broader audience.

"The newsletter's mission has remained the same from our earliest days: to provide information and practical solutions to a wide range of family, job and health issues in order to help our readers reduce their stress and find pleasure in the many roles at work, at home, and in their communities."

About the Founders

Susan Ginsberg, Ed.D., is Editor and Publisher of the Work & Family Life newsletter and a consultant on work-life issues to corporations and nonprofit organizations. She is a founding Board member of the Alliance of Work Life Progress, the leading national organization for professionals in the work-life field. She was recently appointed to the Advisory Panel on Early Childhood Learning Programs at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Previously, she was Associate Dean at Bank Street College, a graduate school of education, where she directed programs for parents and children including the national Parent Child Development Center Research and Demonstration project, which provided services for families with young children in six cities. She also directed on-site inservice training for early childhood programs and provided technical assistance in curriculum and evaluation strategies to a variety of family education programs.

Dr. Ginsberg is the author of the book "Family Wisdom: The 2000 Most Important Things Ever Said about Parenting, Children and Family Life" (Columbia University Press).

Ellen Galinsky, M.S., is President and Co-Founder of the Families and Work Institute, a Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that conducts research on the changing family, changing workforce and changing community. She is the author of over 30 books and reports, including "Ask the Children," selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best work-life books of 1999. She has published more than 100 articles in books, magazines, and scholarly journals.

At the Institute, Ms. Galinsky co-directs the National Study of the Changing Workforce, a comprehensive study of the U.S. workforce and co-directs "When Work Works," a project on workplace flexibility. She is program director of the annual Work Life Conference co-convened by The Conference Board and Families and Work Institute. She also staffs The Conference Board's Work Life Leadership Council.

A leading authority on work-family issues, Ms. Galinsky was a presenter at the 2000 White House Conference on Teenagers and the 1997 White House Conference on Child Care. She is the recipient of numerous awards and, in 2005, she was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. A popular keynote speaker, she appears regularly at national conferences, in the media, and on TV programs, including Today, Good Morning America, The Early Show, and Oprah. Before co-founding FWI, Ms. Galinsky was on the faculty of Bank Street College of Education for 25 years, where she helped establish the field of work and family life.