Janet Theodora Lusk OBE was born in Oxford on 27 April 1924. She spent her early years in Oxford, where her Scottish father was chaplain at Oxford University. In 1933, the family relocated to Edinburgh, where Rev Lusk became minister of West Coates Church. Janet attended St. Leonard's School in St. Andrews until 1942, when she left to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

Following her wartime service, Janet studied French and Spanish at the University of Edinburgh. She then began her social work career as an unqualified worker at Edinburgh Children's Holiday Home before undertaking the postgraduate childcare course at the University of Birmingham between 1955 and 1956. (Birmingham and LSE offered the only two such courses at this time.) In 1957, Janet returned to Scotland and according to an interview carried out in 1990 with Viv Cree for her PhD, she "did what we all did at that time - I went to see Marjorie Brown at the University". Her advice was to apply for a job at the Guild of Service for Women, because it was one of the few agencies at the time that employed qualified social work staff. Janet duly began as a caseworker there, working with what were then called 'unmarried mothers', their children and adoptive parents. Over time, the work of the agency became more focused on adoption and less on unmarried mothers who kept their children. By the late 1950s, Janet and Marjorie Brown came together to explore about the possibility of the University running its own childcare course, particularly targeted at the new local authority children's officers. By 1960, when the first child care course in Scotland was launched at Edinburgh University, placements for students were offered at what was by now called the Guild of Service, and Janet was promoted to senior caseworker. In 1962, she was appointed Director; Marjorie Brown's advice had been that if she was offered the job, she "should take it but not stay too long!" (Interview with Viv Cree, 1990). In the event, Janet held the position until her retirement in 1984, the same year that Edzell Lodge Children's Home closed for good.

Janet had led the Guild of Service (later Family Care) into pioneering work with pregnant women, single parent families, adoption and residential childcare and she served on several key committees including the Houghton Committee on Adoption, in 1969. She had also developed strong and lasting relationships with the University of Edinburgh, so that generations of students were able to benefit from a high quality placement at the agency, just as she herself benefited from the support of University staff, especially her friend and mentor, Marjorie Brown.

In 1972, Janet was awarded an OBE in recognition for her distinguished work in childcare. On her retirement, she was appointed Convener of Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. She was the first woman to do so, and carried on in this role until 1990. Janet died in Edinburgh on 20 June 1994, following a car accident near Inverness.

Sources: Cree, V.E. (1995) From Public Streets to Private Lives. The Changing Task of Social Work, Avebury, Aldershot; interviews with Viviene Cree conducted with Janet Lusk in 1990, and with her sister, Rev Mary Levinson, in 2003; Obituary, The Scotsman, 2 July 1994.