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+About Jeff
My current practice is the newest professional iteration of a career that spans over four decades: first as a recreation therapist with young people in foster homes and residential care and later with young people who had runaway from home or were homeless. Even at the beginning of my career, I realized the impact of early and prolonged experiences of trauma. Later, I became a social worker and my work expanded to providing therapy to individuals, couples, families, and groups. I continue to work in a way that is trauma informed, LGBTQIA+ affirmative, intersectional, creative, and relational. I am now in private practice, where I provide psychotherapy as well as consultation and training to other mental health professionals. As I entered private practice, I was also the Founder and Executive Director of The Wingspan Project (TWP), whose abbreviated mission was to help people who help people. We focused on providing support to frontline workers in violence intervention and prevention as well as health care through organizational and individual capacity building. TWP was most notably dedicated to supporting services to people who have experienced discrimination and stigma and to those whose identities and communities are particularly vulnerable to systems of oppression. I also I spent over14 years as the co-founder and CEO of Live Oak, Inc., an organization providing psychotherapy services to individuals, couples, and families and consultation, supervision, and training to social service professionals and organizations. In addition to my work at Live Oak, I was adjunct faculty at the University of Chicago Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice from 2001-2016, where I created and taught a course on trauma informed practice and a course on social work with groups. I also taught at UIC’s Jane Addams College of Social Work from 1998-2004 where I developed a course on child and adolescent mental health. When I’m not at work---and even sometimes when I am at work---I blog, write poetry and essays, paint, take photographs (some of which are on this website) and garden. I have also volunteered doing adoption home visits for a dog rescue organization. I would be fostering dogs. too, but I'm only allowed to have three dogs at home at any one time and I'm currently at my limit. Thank you for visiting with me. In the words of one of my longtime favorite singers and songwriters, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, "If you want to sing out sing out, and if you want to be free be free. There's a million things to be, you know that there are..." I hope I have the opportunity to meet you. |