Meet the Faculty

Elizabeth Neuville
Executive Director, Keystone Institute
Director, Keystone Institute India
Email: [email protected]

Elizabeth “Betsy” Neuville serves dual roles as Executive Director of the Keystone Institute and Director of Keystone Institute India. She has over 30 years of experience as a human service worker, administrator, agency director, evaluator, educator, and personal advocate, as well as extensive experience in designing and developing supports for people with disability, meaningful quality measurements, and extraordinary employee development programs.

She began her work with people with disability in 1986 as a support worker in a small community home for three men who had recently left an institution, and has continued her commitment to personal human service ever since. In 1988, she was hired by Keystone Human Services to help 20 people leave institutions and establish themselves in their home communities in Pennsylvania, US. She spent her first year with those 20 people and their families planning and envisioning new lives outside the institution, and she continue to walk alongside them as they entered their new lives and created a positive future.

Betsy served as Executive Director for KHS’s office in Lancaster, PA for many years, designing and directing supports for adults and children with developmental disabilities and/or mental disorders. She has assisted hundreds of people to leave institutions and begin lives as valued and contributing members of their communities. Equally important, she has been involved with the closure of several large governmental institutions, and she established the use of person-directed processes to assist people to envision full, rich community lives. She played an important role in building KHS’s reputation as an organization that will successfully support people whom others have given up on. She has mentored a great number of passionate change agents to carry on this work.

Betsy has worked extensively with the ideas of Normalization and Social Role Valorization (SRV) and provides training and consultation both nationally and internationally. She is fully accredited by the North American Social Role Valorization Council as a senior trainer of SRV. She has taught SRV and PASSING in Canada, across the United States, Ireland, the UK, Holland, Turkey, India, Azerbaijan, Romania, and the Republic of Moldova. She studied under the mentorship of Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger, the developer and foremost proponent of Social Role Valorization, and has, in turn, mentored and supported a generation of people committed to personal human service to others. She remains closely connected to people with disability, and holds particular interest in the historical treatment of people with disabilities.

She began using the tools and techniques of Person Directed Planning in 1992 to help people move toward better lives, and has extensively studied and used the work of Beth Mount in Personal Futures Planning and Jack Pearpoint in PATH and MAPS. She has taught Person Directed Planning techniques across North America, and in deinstitutionalization projects in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Azerbaijan. She has developed techniques which merge traditional Person Directed Planning with Social Role Valorization and Model Coherency, increasing the likelihood that such processes will identify and meet true needs, as well as incorporate valued social roles. In 2013, she co-wrote the implementation plan for best practice in Person Directed Planning and positive behavior support for the class action settlement agreement Jensen v State of Minnesota, and has extensively evaluated current practice in this area for the federal court monitor.

She also develops material and teaches on many topics beyond SRV and Person Directed Planning, including Hospitality, American Eugenics, Moral Treatment, Organizational Values in Action, and many other areas. She leads the Keystone Institute in their work of developing top quality workshops and events relating to not only what their work is all about, but why it really matters.

Betsy divides her time equally between India and the US.

Pamela Seetoo
Associate Director
Email: [email protected]

Pam has worked to assist people to live rich, full community lives since 1990. Over the course of her life’s work, she has assisted people to leave institutions and establish themselves in their communities, supported children and families within foster care and host home programs, provided service leadership, and focused on values-based education and facilitation.

Throughout her career, Pam has worked to educate others about the effects of social devaluation of vulnerable populations. She facilitates many presentations at a variety of Social Role Valorization (SRV) and related workshops, leads small group learning and has been a team leader at PASSING events. She develops and organizes an extraordinary employee development program for the Keystone Institute and serves as a mentor and role model to many others. She has a strong interest in preserving and safeguarding the personal histories of people with disability and has developed workshops around this topic. Pam has been accredited as an SRV teacher by the North American Social Role Valorization Council.

Matthew Nguyen
Email: [email protected]

Matt joined the Keystone Institute in 2016, bringing over 17 years’ experience supporting people with intellectual disabilities, developing services for individual people and successfully managing individualized programs and services. He began studying and using Social Role Valorization during his early years working at KHS, and has worked to implement the ideas in the lives of people he has supported. Matt is committed to leading by example and has used his organizational leadership experience to influence others to learn about and apply the ideas of SRV. He believes that engaging in personal human services enriches service workers, leaders and the vulnerable people they serve.

CourtneyHeadshot

Courtney Wagner
Email: [email protected]

Courtney Wagner joined the Keystone Institute in 2023, bringing over twelve years of experience working with people with intellectual disabilities. She was first introduced to the work of Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger and Social Role Valorization in college when she was studying to earn a degree in special education. After ten years of teaching and advocating for children with disabilities, Courtney switched her focus to inclusive post-secondary education, where her understanding of SRV and the implementation of its practices flourished. She is skilled and practiced in the facilitation of Person-Centered Planning processes, including PATH and MAPS, and finds them to be powerful sources of fostering capacity and creating change in people’s lives. She is committed to pursuing the challenge of overcoming devaluation among people with disabilities and believes supporting people in identifying and achieving valued roles to live rich meaningful lives not only fulfills the life of the individual but also everyone that has the privilege of being part of that person’s journey.

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