Since 2013, I have worked within and adjacent to the field of Mental Health. I started out in youth crisis psychiatric care. This job dramatically impacted me as a person and my professional trajectory. It was the sort of job that draws in well-meaning college graduates, chews ’em up, and makes them reconsider their life choices. It was the hardest and scariest thing I’ve ever done for 4 years, and from it I gained the ability to assert myself, design and communicate education groups, and allow the dark shadows of pain into my heart but not let it live there rent-free.

My experiences there drove me to pursue a Master’s degree. Was it possible to design social services that aren’t built on the backs of dramatically underpaid direct-care workers? We were constantly reminded that “we couldn’t do this work without you”, but we simply can’t provide raises this year. My pay went up about a dollar in that time, it was barely above minimum wage, and my job happen to include the constant threat of violence.

Once I entered graduate school, I was able to broaden my scope of practice considerably. I’ve worked hard to take on new and challenging experiences so that I can prepare myself for a future of fulfilling work. I hope to continue to move ‘upstream’ by promoting lasting impacts that support the health and wellness of individuals, groups, and communities.

I’m currently in search of my next career move. In my most recent role, I facilitated a pilot program called the Children’s Cross-system Collaboration Committee, a venue for service providers and families to come together in order to address complex barriers to care. I loved this work because I was been able work with an amazing mentor to develop and launch this unique program based on the needs of Multnomah County. I applied a Systems-lens in order to gather information from a wide range of sources, evaluated the scope of what’s been done and being done, communicated findings in different ways for different audiences, and was able to be creative about how we could take it from a pilot to an ongoing program.