Leadership Team

No bio.

Vinny is the Communications and Administrative Assistant for Safe Passage for Children. She believes that all children should feel safe in their own homes and hopes to continue to push that belief and work towards advocating for a better system. She is also a Real Estate Agent with Superb in the Urbs Team at Realty Group and is a 2024 Board Member for AREAA Twin Cities Chapter.

Before she became a Realtor, she had years of experience in various administrative, event, and marketing roles. Aside from work during her free time she enjoys writing, creating arts and crafts, trying new food, watching movies, and meditating.

• Board – Canterbury Park, Audit and Compensation Committees
• Board – Bachman’s Garden and Gift Stores
• Interim CMO Mayo Clinic
• CEO MN Super Bowl LII
• EVP Mall of America

Maureen Bausch is currently a partner with Bold North Associates (BNA). BNA is a consulting firms specializing in business development, marketing and destination development.

A major focus of current assignments include strategic sponsorships, business development and large scale event planning.

Prior to joining BNA. Maureen was the Interim CMO of Mayo Clinic. Maureen has spent almost a year in this position during a period of transition at Mayo Clinic. During this time, she led marketing, provided oversite for a large team, managed professional sports partnerships market specific corporate outreach and site growth.

Maureen has spent the majority of her career working with retailers. She joined Mall of America in 1990, 2 years prior to opening. She rose to Executive Vice President managing the $1B asset and reporting to the Ghermezian family. As EVP, Maureen had responsibility for a $100M budget, all aspects of the P&L, managed a team of 1500, worked with 800+ retailers, restaurants and attractions over 25 years. Maureen lead the Business Development efforts, attracting new retail and attractions. Mall of America opened in 1992 and generated total sales of over $800M within 5 years.

She began her career directing advertising for Cub Foods, her family’s business. During her 13- year tenure, the company grew from 4 stores to 85 in 14 states. Cub was sold to Super Valu and transitioned from a private family organization to part of a publicly held, large wholesale food organization.

Maureen left Mall of America in 2015 to become the CEO of MN Super Bowl LII. During this 4-year assignment, she launched 2 companies a 501C3 and a 501C6. Raising $60M in private funding, she created the Bold North brand, hired a staff of 32, secured 10K volunteers and engaged 400 committee members from the public and private sector. She had oversight responsibility for 200+ events and 5800 visiting media. The Minnesota Super Bowl LII has been deemed by the NFL as the most successful in history with an economic impact of $450M for Minnesota.

Maureen graduated from the University of Minnesota with an MA in Journalism/Marketing and has taken further continuing board education courses at Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management. She has always been active in the community. She has been a board member for several non-profit organizations, St. Catherine University, Minnesota Retailers Assoc. US Department of Commerce Travel and Tourism. Today she is a board member of the MN Orchestra, Taste of the NFL as well as others. Maureen and her husband Bill, live in St. Paul and have 5 adult children. They enjoy traveling, family and outdoor activities.

Lisa Hollensteiner is a physician who practiced 32 years in Emergency Medicine.  Due to frustrations with receiving inadequate responses to her reports to Child Protection about children who had been abused or were in significant danger, she sought out involvement with Safe Passage with Children as a way to improve child welfare. Lisa subsequently served on the Governor’s Task Force for Child Protection which put forth 91 recommendations to improve child safety. She recognizes that there is still much work to be done and is committed to continuing to work toward change through legislative advocacy with Safe Passage.

Lisa attended University of Pennsylvania Medical School and is  board certified in both Family Practice and Emergency Medicine. She has given educational lectures to medical staff about recognizing the importance of social factors such as home environments, abuse, mental health, and previous traumas, and how they impact better understanding and providing the best care for the patient. She currently lectures on medical advocacy, advance care planning, and how to best navigate medical care.

Greg spent all but 15 months of his 40 year social work career working in the Child Protection system. He retired from Hennepin County, Minnesota in June, 2014, after having worked there for 37 years. Greg worked as a direct service worker in both the case management and the investigations areas of Child Protection. He was a unit supervisor for 30 years in foster care, Child Protection Case Management and for the last 24 years of his career in the areas of Child Protection Screeening, 24/7 Immediate Response and mostly in the area of CP Investigations. Greg served on several hospital and community based Child Abuse Teams, as well as on the Hennepin County Child Abuse Team. He also functioned as the Child Protection liaison for Hennepin County with the Minneapolis, Bloomington and Richfield Police Departments. For a number of years during the 1980’s and the early 1990’s Greg was also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Minnesota School of Social Work. Greg received his BA in sociology from St. John’s University (Collegeville, MN) and his Master’s of Social Work from the University of Minnesota. During his working career he was a member of the National Association of Social Workers and the Academy of Certified Social Workers. He was also licensed as a “Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker” by the State of Minnesota Board Of Social Work.

Ghazi is an experienced nonprofit leader, with experience in finance, accounting and information technology (IT). He currently is a consultant for nonprofit organizations. Most recently, he was chief financial officer for Living Well Disability Services, in Eagan, Minn. In that role, he led the financial and IT affairs of a $21 million nonprofit organization serving the needs of people with disabilities. From 2008 to 2012 he was director of Finance for the Homeownership Preservation Foundation (HPF), based in Minneapolis. Although the HPF itself received little public attention, it was formed in the wake of the mortgage crisis in 2007. With the backing and direction of the White House, it ran a phone hotline to help distressed homeowners.  Ghazi created financial processes for this $63 million agency’s work with major banks and counselors; the hotline eventually helped millions of homeowners restructure their mortgages and keep their homes. Ghazi also served as director of Finance and Regulatory Services, Housing and Employment Services, for the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, from 2005 to 2008. From 1990 to 2005, he was chief financial officer for Growing Home, a Saint Paul, Minn.-based, multi-state foster care organization with a $12 million annual budget.

Nalee is a mom of a blended family, wife, entrepreneur, coach, mentor, community advocate-leader, Team Lead of her Real Estate Team, and a Shamanic Energy and Spiritual Healer. After attending Hamline University and graduating with a B.A. in Legal Studies and Paralegal Certificate, she worked in the legal field for 12 years as a Complex Commercial Litigation Senior Paralegal. Nalee’s passion to help children fueled from different aspects of her ability to see and empathize as a natural born Shamanic Healer, to the years of hardship through life as a single mother who protected her child’s best interest and fought to keep her blended family safe from a neglectful and toxic environment. She started her journey with Safe Passage as a volunteer in 2015 and later became a board member and annual donor. Nalee extended her ability to advocate for children and women to being a voice in the BIPOC community. She led a 4-year term as the first Hmong person and Hmong Woman Vice-President and President of the national organization, Asian Real Estate Association of America-Twin Cities Chapter. AREAA is one of the four largest diversity trade organizations in the nation to promote homeownership within the AAPI community and close the racial disparity gap. Nalee later became one of the Co-Founders of the first and largest annual BIPOC homeownership events in Minnesota, “Twin Cities Diversity Homeownership Fair,” where real estate, lending and housing professionals come together to educate and empower thousands of consumers annually. Today, Nalee continues to find ways to advocate for neglected children to protect their innocence and diverse families of multi-generations who want to achieve the homeownership dream. She believes that if we want to see change, start first by raising children who will be of contribution to society and have compassion to love and help humanity in return.

Calvin is an “ex-officio” member of the board of directors. In that capacity, he advises Safe Passage and participates in board discussions, sharing his firsthand knowledge of the system, how it can affect children and families, and how he helps them navigate that system. Calvin was born in Arkansas, moving at a very young age to Wisconsin and, ultimately, Minnesota. From ages one to 12, he was in the foster care system. He began his career as a substitute teacher in Minneapolis public schools, and later held a managerial position with AT&T until becoming one of many managers to lose their positions as part of a corporate downsizing. In the meantime, he became involved with the child protection system as a volunteer guardian ad litem with Hennepin County. That later led to a contract position as a guardian ad litem and, eventually, to working in that position full time. He has been a full-time guardian ad litem for seven years. Calvin says that, in his role, he is responsible for making recommendations to the court as to what is in the child’s best interests. In fulfilling that role, he has no “agenda,” whether in favor of parents, the court or any other parties to a child protection case. He is an officer of the court, given the room needed to gather the facts about a case and bring those facts – and his recommendations – to the family court judge. Calvin enjoys his current work because it gives him the opportunity to have a genuine impact on the lives of children who are subject to family courts and the child protection system. Guardians ad litem, he says, can help end the “downward spiral” that can trap victims of child abuse and neglect.

Melissa DeBilzan is the former executive director of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (MNAAP), where she worked for 10 years before deciding to spend more time with family. During that time, she oversaw a variety of work groups that met on a regular basis, managed multiple state and national grant projects, communicated with legislators and state agencies, planned annual conferences for pediatric professionals, organized Pediatricians’ Day at the Capitol, and led numerous other activities that contributed to the organization’s mission of advancing the health and wellbeing of children in Minnesota. One of those work groups was on child abuse and maltreatment. 

She has more than 20 years of experience in communications and project management, mainly for small nonprofits but also for small businesses. She earned a degree in journalism from the University of St. Thomas in 2001 with a concentration in public relations and a minor in computer science. 

Melissa recently earned a Digital Marketing Professional (DMP) designation from the American Marketing Association/Digital Marketing Association to better understand how organizations can better leverage digital communication tactics. She is a wife and mother of 5 children and also serves as a mentor to 8 international students in Saint Paul. 

Maggie Carney is  a retired pediatric nurse (RN) formerly employed at Children’s Minnesota Hospital for the entirety of her 40-year career.  As a pediatric nurse she advocated for the health and safety of her young patients in multiple areas, completing her career at Midwest Children’s Resource Center (MCRC) a clinic within the hospital specializing in the evaluation and treatment of suspected abuse patients.  Maggie has valuable experience interfacing with a variety of community partners including child protection, law enforcement, court officials, mental health and public health providers.  She continues to hone her skills through regular attendance at peer review conferences with her former local and national colleagues.  Maggie’s knowledge base and expertise in the child abuse field brings valued skills to the Safe Passage for Children of MN board.

Carol was in  the field of counseling for 46 years before retiring in 2022. She began her career in 1976 in residential treatment, first at the Wilson Center with adolescents and then at Lowe House, which was affiliated with Abbott Hospital. The population there were children between the ages of 6-12. The focus was to help the children and parents become reunited. All of these families had  been deeply impacted by adult mental illness, poverty, abuse and addiction. The focus was  trying to provide an atmosphere of repair, helping the children recover from sometimes severe disruption while also helping parents get strong. Eventually family therapy was provided when the parents and children were adequately recovered .

After several years there she became involved with community mental health at NIP, Neighborhood Involvement Program. She was also involved at Storefront where she had a grant to work with families struggling with sexual abuse. From there she went onto Minnetonka Mental Health Center(which became Pyramid mental health center) where she eventually directed the children’s and family mental health division.
Intermittently, she also consulted in the schools, gave talks about the needs of children and mental health, focusing on divorce and step parenting.  Eventually, she consulted with  a program, Emerge, for families coming out of chronic homelessness.

In 1997, she opened her own psychotherapy practice. By this time, she had  become  licensed as a LICSW Social Worker and an LMFT.

In her private practice she focused on working with couples, believing that families stay strong when the couple is strong. She also did group and individual therapy. Towards the end of her career, she became involved with issues in the LGBTQ community. She also became interested in somatic therapy and created a program called “Finding True Self” which she is currently planning on presenting in a digital format.

Bio

Doug (D.J.) Tice retired in April, 2024 as Commentary Editor, Opinion Page columnist, and a member of the Editorial Board at the Star Tribune, Minnesota’s largest news organization. During his 45-year career as a Twin Cities journalist. Doug covered and commented upon child protection issues over the course of decades, beginning in the early 1990s as an editorial writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press calling for the opening of juvenile and child protection court proceedings to the press and public. At the Star Tribune, first as political news editor and later on the Opinion pages, he continued to cover efforts to reveal and reform inadequacies in Minnesota’s systems for protecting abused and neglected children, including commenting on revelations in several major Star Tribune investigations of the system. 

Doug’s varied career in Minnesota journalism including writing and editing roles for Corporate Report, a regional business magazine, and Twin Cities, a general interest city magazine, and as both editor and publisher of the Twin Cities Reader, an alternative weekly newspaper. His writing about state and national politics, history, economics and legal affairs has won numerous awards, including the Minnesota Book Award for History in 2000 for ‘Minnesota’s Twentieth Century,” and a Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award in 2009.