Yolaine Menyard, LCSW, has provided trauma-informed services to young people and adults in New York for close to a decade. She has worked in agency and community settings supporting people through a range of every-day stressors and major life experiences, including substance use, serious mental health issues, grief and loss, criminal legal involvement, and systemic oppressions.
As a clinician and trainer, Yolaine has experience identifying and addressing interpersonal and structural-based trauma. She seeks to better understand how trauma, especially racial and sexual trauma, can manifest in our bodies. Yolaine’s approach to clinical work is grounded in a deep sense of care and humility and anti-oppressive values. She believes that the sharing of oneself in the therapeutic setting requires a level of vulnerability and risk-taking that should be protected and empowered.
Yolaine has provided supportive counseling, developed curriculums and group interventions, and provided training and clinical supervision to multiracial teams. In her current agency-based work, she advises on criminal justice policy and research that intersects with direct practice. Yolaine is a licensed master social worker in the State of New York and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work (MSW) from the University of Chicago.