Amy Ebbeson, LCSW is the Director of Vision and Content at Worcester ACTs (Addresses Childhood Trauma) and a Consultant for the Collaborative for Youth and Community Justice at Clark University. She has Master’s in Clinical Social Work from Boston University and has worked in a variety of social service settings, including the Devereaux School, City Year and the Department of Mental Health. She describes herself as an empathy activist. She hopes to use empathy as a vehicle for individual and social change.
The awareness that people were afforded different amounts of power and resources depending on their identity group was deeply troubling to her and lead her to activate. She has engaged in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming, youth empowerment and anti-racism work for more than 25 years. Her overarching goal is to open hearts and minds and that has lead to teaching and training as a primary focus. When we change our mind, we change our life. She has taught Mental Health content to students at the undergraduate and graduate level in Massachusetts colleges including Worcester State, Springfield College, and the Wheelock College School of Social Work. She served as Co-chair for the Worcester County Commission on the Status of Women for eight years and was the 2018 recipient of the YWCA Erskine Award in Education for her work to empower women and eliminate racism.
She believes that trauma is the weapon of oppression and is the root cause for the majority of distress and disconnection. She has experienced trauma in childhood and as an adult and considers it to be the thread that connects all her work. She has engaged extensively with the trauma knowledge base, but has also recognized that learning from lived experience is very different from learning in the classroom. She launched Trauma Training Tuesday in 2019 to integrate learning from the heart and from the head and to validate the impact of marginalization. It is her hope that recognizing when and how trauma manifests will help us heal as individuals, and that this will lead us to heal our communities. She is also a maker of bold necklaces, a mom, and a dog lover.
https://childwellbeingandtrauma.org/toolkits/brc-toolkit/
https://www.waysideequitycenter.org/the-team/