Community Diversity Panel on Homelessness and Social Action

This panel is intended to generate a conversation around how CIIS alumni and students are engaging the emergency of homelessness in the Bay Area. We hope that the conversation can demonstrate how CIIS can be a positive influence in supporting the homeless population, how our graduates can become involved in these efforts, and how we can all take action to address this increasingly challenging reality.

Many issues may come up along with the discussion about mental health access such as the tech boom and its negative effect on the middle class, as well as the current political climate.

We aim to inspire current students and to give alumni a chance to share with us what they're up to after graduation. For questions, contact Cynthia Mitchell at cmitchell@ciis.edu

Panelists:

Sekayi Edwards (EXA ‘13) Behavioral Health Clinician at Southeast Child/Family Therapy Center, is a lifelong student of imagination and creativity. His exploration of the personal, cultural, and spiritual meaning that creativity brings to healing. Sekayi is a musician, composer of instrumental music, game developer, and expressive arts therapist working with children, youth, and families living in San Francisco.

Traci Ruble (ICP '05) CEO of PSYCHED Magazine and Director of Sidewalk Talk, a community listening project with city chapters across the US, Canada, Portugal and South Africa. Recently featured in Forbes Magazine, she is in private practice and previously worked in tech, selling software to the federal intelligence community. Traci also studied politics at UC Santa Barbara.

Laurel Elliott is a Drama Therapy Counseling Psychology student completing her studies at CIIS. She is interning at Because Justice Matters, a faith based community organization in the Tenderloin which specializes in providing services for the women and girls who live in the neighborhood. She has been delighted and blessed to witness client's use of Drama Therapy techniques in processing significant trauma and adverse childhood experiences.

Sean Stefon Bell (EXA '18) is an AMFT currently working with children and families in the Contra Costa County and anticipates starting his small, supervised, private practice working primarily with queer people of color in the East Bay Area. He worked formerly as an MFT trainee at Queer LifeSpace (QLS) a nonprofit counseling agency that sought to bring sustainable mental health and substance abuse services to the LGBTQ+ community. Formally trained as an artist, he utilizes the visual arts, literary and poetry therapies, sand tray, mindfulness, metaphor, and narrative techniques. Sean Stefon practices under Afrocentric, trauma informed, cultural relational, and emotion focused frameworks and spent several years working with "at-risk" youth and homeless teens and families in residential milieus.