I have been a social worker for over 33-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, I received my Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare (BASW) degree from the University of Washington's School of Social Work, and 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. Two years later, I received my Master of Social Work (MSW) degree from San Diego State University, and to date, have been trained at all levels of care inclusive of inpatient psychiatric care, outpatient care, partial-hospitalization and intensive-outpatient programs, day treatment centers, as well as 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, medical and psychiatric hospitals, as well as within specialty and primary care clinics. Upon becoming a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in 2008, I returned home to the San Francisco Bay Area where I 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 conscientious of the importance of giving back to the communities from where I started. For that reason, I previously volunteered as an instructor for the Spanish-speaking Family-2-Family Program and as a group facilitator for the Spanish-speaking Family Support Group, both under the auspices of NAMI-San Francisco. I have also served on the Board of Directors for Our Family Coalition and in 2025 was appointed to the Behavioral Health Board of Marin County. For the first time since returning to the Bay Area, I finally feel at home among my fellow colleagues here at Alta Mira Recovery Programs.