Leslie’s Story

I’m a social worker by vocation and became an educator along the way.  There was a deep thread of community service in my family growing up and I began volunteering at a young age.  In my late-teens and early twenties I worked with families experiencing homelessness, youth with developmental disabilities, and young people in the foster care system.   

In 2005, I was hired by an organization called SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) in San Francisco, CA and began my path into the current movement to end commercial sexual exploitation and, what we later called, human trafficking.  It is an understatement to say I was fortunate to work with a survivor-led organization early on, even though I was not personally a survivor of CSEC.  I was able to learn from the grace, grit, wisdom, and lessons of survivors, for which I am ever grateful and deeply humbled. 

Up to and during the 2000’s and into the 2010’s it was common practice most everywhere to arrest youth as young as 12 for the “crime” of prostitution and legally ignore any adults involved in the situation.  I once had the defense attorney of a 13-year-old, facing her third charge for prostitution, laugh in my face at the suggestion that this youth couldn’t legally consent to the underlying sex act of prostitution.  I witnessed countless judges, lawyers, social workers, teachers, and caregivers blame young people for their own harm and exploitation.

The trauma and violence these young people endured was harrowing but it was the hypocrisy and wrong-headedness of the adults around them that initially motivated me.  From there I set out to do two things: help change systems causing this harm and provide support and services for young people.  And that has remained my focus for much of the past 18 years. 

We did our best with what we knew at the time, but it was often two steps forward and one step back.  And the realities and roadblocks we faced along the way caused me to understand trauma in ways that differed somewhat from what I learned in graduate school.  The definitions and framing offered in my clinical education didn’t adequately describe all the traumatic events, conditions, and responses I saw in youth, individually or collectively.  Nor did the evidence-based interventions we were taught seem to work (or even be accessible) to many in the communities I was serving.  So, in collaboration with my friend and colleague, Teddy McGlynn-Wright, we created the Integrative Healing & Trauma Framework.

In Fall, 2014 I returned as faculty to the University of Washington, School of Social Work where I earned my MSW in 2010.  While my work was largely focused on responses to trafficking and youth homelessness, I also was steeped in social justice work, social welfare policy and the non-profit and public agencies in which social work is implemented.  These became the primary topics that I still teach at the University.  

My years of providing direct services and management transitioned to consulting, training, social work education, and developing the Integrative Healing & Trauma Framework.  All these pieces inform, and are strengthened, by each other.  This training content encompasses over two decades of direct practice, advocacy, reflection, and teaching. I am excited to be able to share these skills and concepts with wider audiences using modern technology and offering training in a self-paced E-Learning format.

This card has been posted somewhere visible to me in every office space I’ve occupied since my time at SAGE.  “I am willing to believe that something else is possible.”   The thread through all my experience is the idea that transformation is possible and that we have the capacity to transform.  So let us work together, I look forward to connecting.

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Leslie in the Media