In honor of March being National Social Work Month, we’re featuring a few of our staff members making a difference as they share their reasons for joining the field.
Meet Jamie Cooper. Jamie is a school-based clinician at C.K. Burns School and Saco Middle School. She has been with Sweeter off and on for over 20 years.
“I had to change my major quite a lot in college. I had a feeling that I wanted to do this, but I wasn’t quite sure. I had grown up kind of poor and didn’t really have many resources. I knew I wanted to make a difference somehow. School never came easy. I knew I wanted to work with kids. When I finally went through the doors and entered my first social work class it was sort of like coming home and I just knew that this was where I was supposed to be.”
Watch the Jamie’s full story …
Next, meet Dustin Spencer-L’Heureux, a clinician behavioral health specialist out of Lewiston. He has a Masters in Social Work, Clinical Condition from UNE, sits on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and has been with Sweetser for a year and a half.
“Since I was about 10 years old, I wanted to be a therapist. I had a lot of personal experience with mental health both personally and within my family. Social work incorporated advocacy, something that I’ve always been passionate about. Very involved with fighting for human rights with the LGBTQ+ community and advocating for disability rights. Music is something I can incorporate into my social work. I partially use it as a way to build rapport with clients. I also use it as a way to communicate with clients that might have a harder time communicating in a traditional way. Sometimes a song can speak to how a person is feeling without a need for any other communication.”
Finally, meet Emily Ostrow, a school-based clinician in MSAD #60 since October 2019. She earned a Masters in Social Work, clinical program, from Simmons University in Boston. Her Dad was in this same field.
“I always loved helping people. I was not a traditional graduate student. It took a long time and I had to work through grad school. I didn’t realize how clinical you can get as a social worker and I’m very clinical. I get to be collaborative with doctors, teachers, and parents. As a mother with two young children, being in a school-setting just made sense. I like feeling valued and I think as a social worker in a school in particular, you have a very unique role. I really appreciate that people know what I do, come to me for it, and that I get to do it. I am very proud of social work. I definitely want anyone who is drawn to it, to at least look into because we need them.”