When you work at a place like Ascend, it takes a lot of teamwork to get our facilities running smoothly. While we’ve highlighted some of our staff that works in-house in the past, it’s time to take a look at one of our administrative team members that makes just as much of a difference to our clients and their families.
Meet Sarina, our Alumni Program Coordinator. She’s a newer addition to the Ascend team and handles a lot of the post-treatment work for our programs. Learn more about what she does to help our clients thrive – even after they’ve ended their time in one of our residential treatment centers.
What Does An Alumni Program Coordinator Do?
As Alumni Program Coordinator, Sarina schedules and helps host groups for parents and teens after treatment with us ends. Some kids transition to a higher level of care or go home to their regular lives, but find that they still want the sense of community we foster in our facilities. To help with their transition, we’ve developed an alumni program full of support, process, and meditation groups online, as well as special events where alumni and parents can reconnect with Ascend in person.
Sarina also takes on running all our social media pages, promoting mental health and wellness through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eventually, she hopes these pages will become a safe haven for teens and parents looking for advice – full of mental health resources and guides.
Finding Her Way to Us
When she realized that social work was her calling in late 2019, Sarina was driven to find a position where she could actually help people on an individual level. Her first role in her chosen field was as a Resident Advisor at an adult recovery facility in Malibu. While she enjoyed her time working in women’s mental health, she preferred the recovery community and transitioned to work with veterans who suffered from PTSD as a Resident Advisor instead.
We discovered her while she was working in that position and offered her a role with our team. Because one of Sarina’s favorite things about mental health treatment is watching former clients grow and thrive outside of treatment facilities, she knew that an Alumni Program Coordinator role would be the perfect place for her. With us, she could continue to connect with clients post-discharge.
Why Ascend?
Sarina was already well on her way to becoming a valuable member of any mental health team, so why did she choose Ascend? In addition to interacting with clients and families post-treatment, she also loves that her job has such a positive impact on their lives. Furthermore, she feels like her entire team trusts her to take the lead with all sorts of unique ideas, allowing her to be incredibly creative when putting on events and publishing social media posts.
Sarina Is One Of Our Best!
Since we spotted Sarina’s talent, we’ve only seen it grow and develop during her time with us. She has transformed our alumni program with her ingenuity into a place that fosters a strong sense of community and connection. Sometimes, our clients and their families feel a little lost outside of residential treatment, so Sarina and her alumni program events bring them back into the fold without requiring such a high level of care.
A Day In Her Life
Sarina starts her checking in on Slack messages and emails. Next, she goes through her professional planner to confirm work events and make sure they don’t clash with non-work events in her personal planner. After prioritizing her tasks in order of importance, you might find her setting up alumni groups for the coming month, creating flyers to send out information for alumni parents and teens, planning social media posts to ensure their relevance for our alumni, or working closely with Nina and Trey on Alumni Talks – a new initiative for the program.
Nina is our Alumni Program Assistant, and Trajan is our Special Projects Manager, and both contribute to Sarina’s work on the Alumni Program.
Enjoying Her Free Time
While Ascend asks a lot of Sarina, she does have some downtime in which to ensure self-care and pursuit of passion projects. Currently, Sarina is working on a book of poetry that she would love to publish one day. We can’t wait to see what kind of prose she has in store!
We Work With The Best
Ascend is a place where we do some of the most important work in the world – helping the next generation of young people find themselves and learn how to thrive. Because our work is so crucial, we’re constantly on the hunt for passionate, talented people to include on our team. So if you’re looking for a compassionate, empowering place to work in a position that literally saves people’s lives, Ascend could be the right place for you!
Learn more about joining our team today when you explore our open positions.
