| Allyson is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker at The Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake since 2019. She began her journey as an MSW intern at UICSL before graduating from The University of Southern California.
Allyson is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone and has northern Paiute lineage as well. Her areas of clinical focus include treatment of substance use disorders, OCD and anxiety related disorders, as well as trauma-informed general mental health treatment.
She is committed to serving The People alongside many amazing practitioners at UICSL as they strive to deliver excellent behavioral health care to the urban Native community.
1) What drew you to behavioral health leadership, and what has been most meaningful to you about serving Native communities?
Behavioral health leadership was a new and engaging challenge I didn’t realize I was looking for. It’s a completely different pathway than doing clinical therapy, which was my comfort zone for so long. I’ve always been so inspired by our clients and the work they put into making meaningful changes in their lives, and my philosophy has always been to walk the walk, just the same way we ask our clients to do hard things.
It’s been an incredibly humbling journey entering into a leadership role, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to support my team and serve our community in a new capacity. I really enjoy the interconnectedness of the work we do- we work with individual clients, and eventually get to work with their families, and then full circle we may all see each other at a community event. That’s what makes being a helper so fulfilling, and it’s honestly such a privilege to be so connected with the people we serve.
Now that I don’t do clinical work anymore, I love seeing old and new clients throughout our building and also being in a position to advocate for our clients and department needs as a whole.
2) Behavioral health is deeply connected to culture, family, community, and historical experiences. How do you incorporate cultural understanding into the way you support patients and staff? It’s important that all our providers have a foundational understanding of who our community is, including the cultural impact of factors like historical trauma. On that same note, it’s equally important that we all have an understanding of our Native community’s incredible resilience overall, which helps us to approach each interaction with our clients using a strengths-based lens. Approaching our client work this way allows us to provide a space for them to feel seen and heard, and that ultimately builds the connection we’re looking for in behavioral health. Our UICSL values of heritage, equity, opportunity, and education, to name a few, remain the cornerstone of our work together. We work hard to ensure our intake to treatment pipeline is strong, so that way we can support our clients to be successful in a healthcare system that isn’t always designed to meet their needs. We work hard to advocate for our justice involved clients as they navigate the legal system as well as their recoveries. And we work hard to provide all our clients with excellent, ethical, Indigenous-focused behavioral healthcare. 3) What do you believe are some of the biggest behavioral health challenges facing the Native population we serve, and how can our organization better respond to those needs? Some of the biggest challenges we see working with our Native community include co-occurring behavioral health disorders, suicidality, and limited access to adequate healthcare. Our urban relatives here in the city can face some unique challenges, whether someone has recently relocated to the valley or is adjusting to generations of being away from traditional homelands. We as helpers also have the unique challenge of meeting the needs of our clients, in the most tailored, culturally relevant way. This can be tricky, considering we are so lucky to serve many tribal citizens from all over who have their own unique backgrounds. One way we can continue responding to the needs of our clients is to listen. Listen to what our community needs, what they’re looking for, and how to best serve them. As an agency, we can also respond to community needs by integrating their feedback into the work we do together- things like tailoring our internal policies and procedures to fit those needs, and adapting our service menus when appropriate. This also includes staying open to feedback when we miss our intended mark. Some of our most popular group activities have come around thanks to input from our relatives in the community! 4) How do you build trust with patients who may have had difficult or disappointing experiences with healthcare systems in the past? This can be so relatable! Unfortunately, many of us have had disappointing experiences within the healthcare system. I think about my own, as well as others I’ve listened to, and ways we’ve struggled to navigate finding help. I keep these elements in mind as I check in on our behavioral health processes and service delivery. All our clients come through our doors with their own stories and their own experiences, and those shade their awareness of us as helpers in the community. It takes courage to reach out for support, whether it’s medical or behavioral health, and as staff here we want to validate that and respond to it. Transparency is key when building rapport with our clients who have had difficult experiences seeking help. It’s so important we include our clients in every healthcare decision, every treatment plan, every move forward regarding their treatment calls for first-hand involvement from our clients. Consistency with communication, follow-through behaviors, and respectful language/messaging can also do wonders when it comes to building trust. And patience! Building trust takes time. A little humor (appropriate and well timed, of course) goes a long way too. 5) As a Behavioral Health Manager, how do you balance the clinical needs of patients with the administrative responsibilities of leading a behavioral health program? I really enjoy being part of our clinical team and hearing weekly how our clients are progressing. It’s a helpful way to stay connected to the clinical operations and to stay close to their needs overall. Our behavioral health providers are all really proficient at what they do, plus we have an excellent clinical supervisor, and together they have our operations running quite well! This greatly supports my ability to balance my administrative duties, and staying connected with my team helps me know how to best support them and our program. 6) What does culturally responsive behavioral healthcare look like to you in practice—not just as a concept, but in the day-to-day experience of a patient? Every phone call, every in-person visit we get, each interaction is an opportunity to provide a positive experience for our relatives who come in. When a client presents for an initial intake appointment, we assess their needs and ask “What brings you in to see us? What’s your story?”. As a behavioral health department we prioritize training and education that’s relevant to our community, and our clinical providers meet weekly for clinical staffing and supervision. Having balanced, supported behavioral health providers available to our clients models to them a full circle of support. Programmatically, it looks like integrating traditional healing practices into our treatment planning with the same frequency and intentionality as we do with other clinical interventions. Our referral system for our sweat lodge is an example a process we developed to utilize a traditional practice as a treatment intervention for recovery. We teach our clients to view themselves and their healthcare as one connected system, and we use the medicine wheel as a familiar point of reference. 7) How do you support your team when they are working with patients experiencing complex needs, trauma, substance use, mental health challenges, or crisis situations? We have a weekly consultation group, our “therapy for the therapists”, which has created a great internal support network for everyone. All our clinical providers meet for about an hour and a half every Tuesday to discuss the impact of their client work, especially for those providers working with high risk and high needs clients. Since burnout can be common in our field, we wanted to create a space for our providers to debrief and seek feedback and support from one another on client-related matters. The goal was to provide our staff with an actionable pathway to ongoing support, because when our providers are their best, most balanced selves, their clinical judgement and service delivery elevate as well. With our weekly consultation group, our behavioral health team (and as a result, our clients!) can get through just about anything 8) What role do you believe traditional healing, cultural practices, family, and community can play alongside Western behavioral health services? Traditional values and healing practices have such a vital role in how we support our clients through their treatment here. Our behavioral health team just recently completed an intensive Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) training together, and throughout our training journey we all maintained the same objective- how do we Indigenize this treatment modality and deliver this to our community in an applicable way? It’s been incredible to see our team build our DBT program around the needs of our clients. I also think about the other Western modalities we currently practice, and the goal with that is to always supplement with other medicines. Clinical therapy is one way to heal, but it isn’t the only way for our clients to be successful. We keep this in mind as we’re developing treatment plans and identifying other cultural interventions to help. Whether it’s a referral to our Elder’s Corner or language class, we understand that community, family, and spirituality are all necessary medicines that support some of our more clinical offerings. 9) How do you measure whether a behavioral health program is truly making a difference in the lives of the people and families it serves? We can take a look at our program and client data and see what story it tells. What are our caseload numbers showing us, and are we giving our relatives adequate opportunity to provide feedback and discuss their experiences? The easiest numbers to grab onto are service utilization, funding availability and usage, and staffing coverage. When those are up, we can see how our behavioral health services are being delivered throughout our community.
Other important metrics include qualitative information- what are our clients telling us about how their lives are being impacted by their treatment? Are they sharing their success stories with us, as well as their grievances? It’s important that we look at our clients as more than just numbers on a caseload, or a spectrum of symptoms we want reduced. We want to know how our clients’ progress is going to translate into their own lives, beyond what they answer on our Wellness Screener.
10) Looking ahead, what is your vision for behavioral health at UICSL, and what would you like to see the program accomplish for the community over the next several years? We’re working on strengthening our aftercare programming to extend our circle of support for our relatives who have successfully completed treatment. We’d love to develop an alumni program to stay connected with our graduates and to weave in our newly integrated peer support services in that area as well. We want our program to be the go-to for high-quality, culturally responsive behavioral healthcare for all our urban relatives. We also strive to establish our program as a resource for others who also serve our Native relatives in behavioral healthcare. We want to be the point of reference for best practices in our community. Of course, expansion and sustainability are always targets for the work we do. Our behavioral health service delivery is quite strong in Salt Lake county, however we plan to strengthen our delivery throughout our entire service area, including expansion of telehealth services in order to efficiently reach the other 4 counties we also serve. | 
