Faculty/Staff ProfileTitle

Aubrey Edwards-Luce (she/her/hers) is the Executive Director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and Courts (CFCC). She is a passionate, award-winning advocate for children, youth, and families, dedicated to co-creating liberating solutions with those most affected by social and legal systems. Aubrey is a social worker-turned-lawyer, who has over 15 years of experience working with children and families who were already in or were at-risk of entering court systems. 

Currently, Aubrey serves the Maryland community as a Commissioner on the Governor’s Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging Best Practices. She also supports the national child advocacy community as a Commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Youth at Risk. Her service and advocacy have been recognized locally with an award from the University of Baltimore and nationally with an award for outstanding advocacy from the National Association of Counsel for Children.

CFCC leverages Aubrey’s skills in coalition building, fundraising, advocacy, and strategic planning to grow its community impact. Under her leadership, CFCC’s Tackling Chronic Absenteeism Project (formerly known as the Truancy Court Program), has initiated a three-year middle school model, designed to prolong the positive impacts of the program during critical years in Baltimore City School students’ academic careers. Additionally, Aubrey has helped CFCC has broaden and deepen its connections to advocacy community, allows CFCC student fellows the opportunity to build their Maryland and National networks as they support CFCC’s policy reform efforts for children and families.  

Aubrey has also connected CFCC with the Child Welfare and Race Equity (CWARE) Collaborative, a national coalition she launched in 2020 while she was Vice President of Child Welfare and Youth Justice at First Focus on Children. The CWARE Collaborative, now a program of CFCC, brings together federal policy strategists and lived-experience experts from across the country who are focused on transforming the child welfare system into an anti-racist system that supports providing children and families with the freedom to thrive in their homes and communities. Before joining First Focus on Children, Aubrey was a senior policy attorney at the Children’s Law Center (CLC) in Washington, D.C, where she also practiced law as a guardian ad litemattorney.

Aubrey has worked with and alongside children and families who were at-risk or were already court-involved from varied vantage points. Her direct services experience includes working in an informal juvenile court supervisions program, a restorative justice-based neighborhood accountability program for youth, a victim’s services office, and as a guardian ad litemattorney for children in abuse, neglect, guardianship and adoption proceedings in D.C. Superior Court. Throughout her experiences, Aubrey has witnessed family courts wield the power to change the trajectory of children’s lives and has worked to ensure that children and families have access to resources and community-based resources before they are entangled in the court system.

Prior to obtaining her J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, Aubrey completed her master’s degree in social work at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work. She was a student fellow in the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention. Aubrey also holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. She gained primary child abuse prevention experience while working at the St. Louis Crisis Nursery. There, she cared for children at risk of abuse and neglect and provided crisis counseling for their parents and guardians. 

Aubrey lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland with her husband, their two daughters, and their cats on land that is the unceded territory of the Piscataway tribe.