If you’ve been with us for a bit, you know that we like to give you a glimpse into how things work behind the scenes at Ascend. While we’ve been showing you a new staff member each month, this month, we’d like to highlight someone you already know: David. We first introduced him back in August of 2020, but a lot has changed since then and it’s time to reintroduce what he does for us. Discover how his role and responsibilities have evolved and learn even more about what it takes to keep Ascend running!
From Therapist to Director
When David first joined Ascend, he was a primary therapist at Magnolia House. He bounced back and forth between Magnolia and Empress to fulfill the needs of our clients — learning more about both facilities and their specific operations. After gaining experience with these residential therapy locations, we decided it was time for an upgrade and we promoted David to Clinical Director for both houses!
Changes & New Experiences
It was a big transition to move from primary therapist to director because there were many responsibilities to set aside and a few new ones to pick up. While David was used to supporting interns, supervising other therapists, and assessing clients as a primary therapist, his management duties greatly increased in the Clinical Director role. With time he has honed his skills to provide more guidance and mentorship for our primary therapists, directing them toward the right treatment plans and therapeutic interventions for each client.
Since he’s in charge of two locations, David actually supports two completely unique clinical treatment teams with very different populations. Each house has distinct clinical profiles that requires adapting frequently in order to ensure the best possible care.
Because he’s one of the few licensed clinicians on the team, he provides direct oversight to less experienced therapists and ensures our quality of care. He’s also made great changes to our processes to improve the efficiency of all our clinical operations, including staff training, quality assurance, strategic planning, compliance and regulation, and program development.
How He’s Grown Into This Role
We’ve talked a bit about how David’s responsibilities have changed, but that’s not the only evolution we’ve seen. With this new role, David’s personal and professional development has skyrocketed with new opportunities for training. Ascend strives to support our team members as they grow through workshops, seminars, and advanced training programs — and David has taken advantage of as many as possible!
We’re committing to David’s ongoing education to provide him with more opportunities in the future and to ensure he has the skills and tools he needs to enhance our programs and become a more effective therapist. With monthly clinical trainings that focus on something new each session, we love to see our directors become more connected to the work they do.
We Love David!
David has always been an incredibly dedicated staff member, but with a few more years of knowledge and experience under his belt, he’s now invaluable to the rest of the team at the Magnolia and Empress locations. He has served in the trenches at several different levels of recovery and treatment to create a well-rounded leader that can help everyone around him thrive.
A Day In His Life
Since assuming the role of Clinical Director about a year ago, David has seen a lot change in his day to day activities. A day in his life now includes lots of meetings with and supervision of our other therapists, as well as sessions with families, individuals, and groups of clients in treatment. While his focus as a primary therapist was mostly on family therapy, now, he’s had to broaden his focus to support staff as well. He also needs to frequently collaborate with our Executive Director, Allison Welsh, reviewing how our programs are running and making improvements to clinical operations.
Why David Loves Ascend
While we love David’s experience, work ethic, and passion for helping others, he’s got a lot to say about us too. For David, Ascend exemplifies an amazing place to work that has an ethical foundation and a strong desire to help our community flourish. Even as we rapidly expand, David loves that we haven’t compromised our integrity or beliefs — working even harder to ensure a high quality of care. He believes we have a leadership team with vision that is doing all it can to maximize the good we do in the world.
Love For Your Work
David is such an integral part of our organization because he truly loves what he does. He loves our staff, working with clients, interacting with parents, and doing outreach in our community. He believes wholeheartedly in the Ascend mission and vision because he can see the difference we’re making in people’s lives.
Keep Up With Us!
Are you looking for more blogs about Ascend team members? We have so much more to explore! Get a glimpse of what every team does when you check out education with Hernst, mentoring with Destiny, and animal-assisted therapy with Nicole. Our team is always growing and there’s new people to meet every month. Check back in March to see who we’re spotlighting next.
