I have been a social worker for over 25-years beginning at the age of 17 when I was one of ten Bay Area high school students recruited to participate in a pilot project funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).  In this project, I became a trained peer-mentor at the Redwood City Youth Health Center (RCYHC) targeting high-risk youth with HIV-prevention education and information.  It was during this experience that it became completely clear to me that social work was my calling.  In 1998, upon earning my Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare (BASW) degree from the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, I returned home to the Bay Area for a year of national service with AMERICORPS as the Coordinator for the Peer-Mentor Program at the RCYHC, back to where this whole journey first began.

In 1999, I left to begin my graduate school education in San Diego, where I received an academically-rigorous and clinically comprehensive training in mental (behavioral) health.  To date, I have been trained in all levels of behavioral healthcare including inpatient, outpatient, partial-hospitalization, intensive-outpatient, day treatment, and recently at the highest levels of residential treatment in the State of California.  In providing outpatient treatment services, my experience has ranged from being home-based to school-based, in a homeless shelter, as well as within specialty and primary care clinics. Upon becoming a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in 2008, I returned home to the Bay Area and have since had the privilege of joining the Master of Science in Clinical Psychology/MFT-Program at Notre Dame de Namur University as a Faculty Lecturer, as well as having co-authored my first clinical publication in 2011.

As a bilingual and tri-cultural man of color, I am not only appreciative of the opportunities I’ve been given in my journey as a professional social worker, but am also very conscious of the importance of giving back to the communities from where I started.  For that reason, I have served as a volunteer-instructor with NAMI-San Francisco for the Spanish-speaking Family-2-Family Program (Familia a Familia), and as a group facilitator for the Spanish-speaking Family Support Group, as well as serving a 3-year term on the Board of Directors for Our Family Coalition.

My care philosophy stems from my 20 -years of training and experience in the field as a Clinical Social Worker.  Before the start of any client/patient meeting, attuning myself begins with embodying the “Strengths Perspective”, which is to ensure that I keep optimism and hope at the forefront of my clinical approach.  Next, in creating the Treatment Plan of Care, a collaboration between myself and the client/patient must be at the very center of this process.  And finally, to truly benefit and experience “therapeutic gains”, all those involved must strive to be H.O.W. (Honest, Open, and Willing), for I truly believe that you can only get out of therapy–what you put in.