The Lewin Group Welcomes Brent Orrell as Senior Vice President and Market Lead for Federal Human Services Practice
October 16, 2011
We're pleased to welcome Brent Orrell to Lewin to serve as the Market Leader for the Federal Human Services group. He previously worked in the Legislative and Executive Branches of the U.S. government for more than 20 years, developing broad experience and extensive knowledge in a wide-range of policy areas including workforce and talent development, prisoner re-entry, faith-based and community initiatives, refugee resettlement, welfare, human services, child welfare and emergency preparedness and response. For the past two years, he had worked as a Senior Fellow in the Family Self-Sufficiency area at ICF International.
“We are delighted to have Brent Orrell join us and to lead our Federal Human Services team,” says Lisa Chimento, CEO, The Lewin Group. “He will draw upon his extensive experience working directly in Federal agencies and in consulting to the government sector to help us grow and expand our human services work.”
In his most recent Federal role, Brent was Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) where he oversaw the nation’s $10 billion Workforce Investment Act (WIA) system that includes programming in workforce development, youth employment and development, unemployment insurance, foreign labor certification, and prisoner re-entry.
Brent is recognized as one of the nation’s leading authorities on public/private partnerships to support communities grappling with the influx of ex-offenders returning from prison. He authored Ready4Work and the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative (PRI), which together have served more than 20,000 returning offenders over the past 6 years and reduced recidivism between 15 and 30 percent compared to national averages. Ready4Work and PRI are widely credited with having helped to break the legislative log-jam in federal re-entry policy leading to enactment of the Second Chance Act of 2008.
Brent also has held positions in the senior management team at the Administration for Children and Families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), as Director of the Center for Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the U.S. Department of Labor, and worked on Capitol Hill for both Democratic and Republican members of the House and Senate for more than 14 years. Brent has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon.