About

In private practice since 2022.

Looking back over more than twenty years in this field, I keep noticing the same thread: families doing their best under real strain, and how much steady support can change that. I’m a Registered Social Worker with dual master’s degrees in Social Work and Theological Studies, and most of my career has been spent close to that thread — in developmental disability services, in child welfare, and in the quieter, ongoing work of supporting families.

It started in group home care — first at Karis Disability Services (formerly known as Christian Horizons), then at Elmira District Community Living, including a period of one-to-one support for someone managing a dual diagnosis. Those years taught me things no textbook could: how much dignity and routine matter, and how differently people can thrive depending on who’s supporting them. Around the same time, I worked as a Special Services at Home worker, spending time in a family’s own home as they raised a child with Down syndrome — its own kind of education. That thread runs right through to the work I do now — providing behavioral intervention, care coordination, and advocacy directly to families whose autistic children live at home with them.

Alongside that work, I spent many years as a child protection worker. It gave me a harder, closer look at what happens when families reach their limit — and more than once, I saw how the exhaustion, fear, and isolation of caring for a child with autism or another disability had quietly pushed a family toward crisis, long before anyone stepped in to help. I understand that particular strain personally as well as professionally, and it’s shaped how I show up for families now: support first, not judgment.

If there’s one thing those group home years left me with, it’s a long view. I watched people who’d moved into residential care as early as birth build entire lives there, and I saw up close how much a person’s sense of identity, independence, and belonging depends on the relationships around them, not just the services provided to them. That’s stayed with me. It’s why my practice today takes a whole-family approach, grounded in cultural humility and bilingual care in English and Korean — because I’ve come to believe that no one’s well-being should be built at the expense of someone else’s in the same family.