Lynn Canfield has served as the Champaign County Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Boards’ Executive Director since 2016 and Associate Director for Intellectual /Developmental Disabilities from 2009 to 2016. Earlier, she worked for 19 years in the DD system in various roles including Medicaid compliance and the coordination of behavioral health treatments for those with multiple diagnoses. Lynn now supports a small team of paid experts plus two volunteer boards and oversees a combined annual budget of over $13m, 90% of which funds services for residents with MI, SUD, or I/DD.

From birth, Lynn was close with a family member who had I/DD, serving as guardian for a time. This was the impetus for her shift to social services from ‘lingering student’ status at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana (UIUC) where she earned a BS in Math and MA in Linguistics. She is immediate past president of the Association of Community Mental Health Authorities of Illinois (ACMHAI), co-chair of their Legislative Committee, vice chair of the board of National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities Directors (NACBHDD), member of the National Association of Counties (NACo) Health Policy Steering Committee, Healthy Counties Advisory Board, Resilient Counties Advisory Board, and Board of Directors. She serves on an advisory committee for Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s State Crisis Intervention Program, Illinois’ Community Emergency Services and Support Act (CESSA) Region 6 Advisory Council, Illinois Department of Behavioral Health and Recovery’s Trade Associations group, UIUC Student Mental Health Committee, City of Urbana Alternative (Police) Response Task Force, and statewide advocacy coalitions.

Lynn has also been a professional musician and artist since the early 1980s, releasing original music until 1998 and performing in a party band since then. Her strengths are in loading equipment and running backstage operations, though she sings and dances begrudgingly. Free time is spent with cats and parrots, tending to the prairie and forest, and working out. In a fun plot twist, she has been clean and sober for over 38 years.