Two School of Social Work Master of Social Work (MSW) students who share a passion for mental health access in minority populations were recently inducted into a renowned fellowship program that will prepare them to serve these populations in the future.
Sashana Rowe-Harriott and Zoe Searles have been accepted into the Council of Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Minority Fellowship Program (MFP). Funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), this program seeks to reduce the effects of substance use and mental health challenges on America’s communities by increasing the number of individuals trained to work with underrepresented and underserved persons at risk for mental health and/or substance use disorders.
Rowe-Harriott and Searles will join a cohort of around 40 MSW students for a series of virtual training sessions and one in-person session convening in the Spring at the MFP’s Fellows Forum. Both students have work experience in providing clinical care, and the fellowship will further prepare them to provide more specialized, targeted help.
“My biggest passion in this work is access to mental healthcare,” Searles said. “I want to provide mental healthcare directly, and I am very passionate about increasing access to folks who want to have culturally competent, affirming, empathetic care, but often don’t receive it. I know I am going to work in that setting, and after learning about this program through Sashana, I thought this would be a perfect fit.”
The program requires each student to work in a setting with racially minoritized populations for two years after graduation in a clinical, teaching, or research capacity. Each student in the MFP program will receive a financial stipend for the fellowship year, in addition to continuous learning and education opportunities. Most notably, the fellowship provides access to a network of fellows, fellowship alumni, and adjacent practitioners and clinicians, creating opportunities for professional development and future employment.
Additionally, fellows must contribute to the sustainability of the program, allowing them to volunteer as a speaker, mentor, or application reader based on each fellow’s capacity and interests.
“I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to deepen my scholarship and build my clinical skills,” Rowe-Harriott said. “This was an opportunity to sharpen my cultural humility and be able to center folks who are often experiencing so much systemic oppression where a lot of things are stacked against them, and to have their mental health needs met more effectively and be able to create emotional safety for them.”
The two new MFP fellows come from different backgrounds – Rowe-Harriott is a Black woman originally from Jamaica, and Searles is a white woman conscious of her identity with an outside perspective – but they both have a passion for the work and the populations that the fellowship seeks to serve.
“As a Black immigrant woman navigating this career, it is nice to know there is a space where I can be held, where I can be scaffolded and guided, to learn how to navigate the field itself,” Rowe-Harriott said.
The fellowship is affiliated with the industry-standard organizations of SAMHSA and CSWE, and Searles said she was grateful for the honor of working with these organizations and the individuals associated with them.
“As a white woman who wants to work with minoritized populations, it is important that I continue to learn how to provide culturally competent care; otherwise, it is not effective,” Searles said. “Any opportunity to learn from professionals, to be surrounded by folks who have direct experience, to be surrounded by folks who have faced that oppression, is a huge learning opportunity to me, and I want to absorb, learn as much as I can, and continue to learn once the fellowship is over.”
Fellowships and Friendships
Both Rowe-Harriott and Searles began their higher education journeys in New York. Rowe-Harriott earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology from Hunter College, while Searles completed an individualized bachelor’s degree in psychology and trauma studies from New York University.
Similarly, the pair both have experiences with nonprofit work that molded their career ambitions. Searles’ work with Leap Year, an Atlanta-based program helping first-generation and low-income high school graduates, first piqued her interest in social work, while Rowe-Harriott’s work as a research and evaluation associate at Social Insights, an organization that creates cutting-edge metrics to measure social innovation, opened her eyes to the industry.
“I learned about the field after my undergraduate degree, and I saw that it was a marrying of my interests in human behavior, sociology, psychology, social justice, and service,” Rowe-Harriott said. “Its values aligned with my faith and how I move through the world – I always dreamt of living a life of service towards others – so it kind of qualitatively felt right.”
Now close friends, both Rowe-Harriott and Searles identified the holistic and person-centered worldview and sense of analysis that many social workers hold as a part of what attracted them to the field. They found these characteristics in the people of the School of Social Work, including Clinical Assistant Professor Naynette Kennett and Assistant Professor Christopher Weatherly, whom the pair encountered in their shared coursework through the MSW program.
“There are a lot of cool, inspirational social workers that teach at the School of Social Work,” Searles said. “It’s been a major plus for me to connect with people that I see as mentors who I feel will continue to be mentors.”
As their network and understanding grow with the new fellowship opportunity, Rowe-Harriott and Searles will bring a new perspective to the School of Social Work and the greater campus community. They’ll use this new outlook to better serve underrepresented groups – the same populations both students wish to interact with during their careers.
“As social workers, we are guided by the core values of service, social justice, holding the dignity and inherent worth of a person, valuing the importance of human relationships, operating in integrity and competence,” Rowe-Harriott said. “Understanding that folks who are sitting at the margins are existing in a context that is unfortunately discriminatory and oppressive – they need to be met with safety, with care and with empathy and understanding.”
