William C. Gaventa, an ordained American Baptist minister and supervisor in clinical pastoral education, is director of Community and Congregational Supports at the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He also serves as an associate professor of pediatrics at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Mr. Gaventa has worked in the field of cognitive impairment for more than thirty years. A summa cum laude graduate of Stetson University, he studied at Union Theological Seminary on a Rockefeller Theological Fellowship and received his M.Div. in 1972 along with the seminary’s Maxwell Fellowship for promise in parish ministry. He has been the pastor of churches in the Bronx section of New York City and in Morrisville, North Carolina. After serving as head of the chaplaincy section of the Division for Disorders of Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina and as Protestant chaplain of the Newark Development Center in Newark, New Jersey, he spent eight years as chaplain and coordinator of religious services for the Monroe Development Center in Rochester, New York, and served as an adjunct professor at the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Bexley Hall, an Episcopal seminary, as well as a clinical instructor in the Program for Developmental Disabilities of the University of Rochester Medical Center. Mr. Gaventa became coordinator of family support for the Georgia Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities in 1990 and accepted his present position two years later. A fellow of the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR), he is the recipient of the AAMR’s Presidential Award and its National Service Award, as well as the 30th Anniversary Point of Light Award of the National Apostolate for Inclusion Ministries, and an award for outstanding institutional chaplaincy given by the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. among other honors. Mr. Gaventa currently serves as executive secretary of the Religion and Spirituality Division of the AAMR and formerly served as president of the division and as a member of the AAMR’s national board of directors. He is also a past member of the boards of directors of the National Federation of Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers and the Pastoral Network for Social Responsibility, of the eastern regional executive committee of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, and of the executive committee of the Congress on Ministries in Specialized Settings. Editor of the Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health, he is a contributing editor to Mental Retardation and the Journal of International Disability Research, and the editor of several newsletters. In addition to publishing journal articles and contributing essays to a dozen volumes of collected works, he is the co-editor (with D. L. Coulter) of four books, The Theological Voice of Wolf Wolfensberger, Spirituality and Intellectual Disability: International Perspectives on the Effect of Culture and Religion on Healing Mind, Body, and Soul, The Pastoral Voice of Robert Perske, and most recently, End of Life Care: Bridging Disability and Aging with Person Centered Care, which was published in 2005 by Haworth Press.