More about Kevin

For the past 40 years, Kevin has spent his career working in several formal and informal capacities focused on helping families heal after facing a traumatic event in life. Kevin has worked in a range of human service and academic institutions across the country and is a highly respected and nationally known clinician, administrator, and educator. This long-spanning career in service, combined with his natural lived experience in service, has allowed Kevin to develop a perspective that very few practitioners can obtain.

Kevin has a strong belief that his approach to accomplishing his established goals starts with examining the impact of childhood loss and grief experiences from the lens of his psychosocial development as an African American male growing up in the South and as a social work practitioner. Kevin believes that despite growth in understanding African American grief, there is a need for developing approaches to education and intervention that inspire hope and courage to make a change. He further believes that the emphasis on perceived pathology and the problem-focused approach has led social workers to shy away from advocacy and prosocial approaches to healing in communities of color.

Kevin feels that the clinical field has had a long history of practice with African American individuals, families, and communities who are coping with grief and trauma. A foundational element of this practice is to challenge social injustice. He hopes that his approach to issues through his consulting platform will help participants to develop historical and contemporary frameworks for understanding how African American children and families cope with grief and ongoing injustices related to death, dying and living by exploring systemic and relational approaches that honor the unique cultural and historical experiences of African Americans.

Kevin’s ultimate goal for each consulting opportunity is to explore the impact of male identity and adult/child relationships on the childhood grief process and discuss practice perspectives and approaches that provide support and opportunities for youth, family, and practitioner development. He seeks to accomplish his goals by providing an overview of the current literature on African American grief; discuss current barriers to understanding African American grief; provide concepts, approaches, and models for change; and explore relevant programming that is reaching out to youth and communities in innovative ways to make a change.