It’s Never Too Late (or Early)
GSSW Class of ’14 Member Veronica Olivares Preventative and Post-Traumatic Approach to Social Work
In the simplest terms, upcoming 2014 GSSW graduate Veronica Olivares dedicates the bulk of her energies to providing others with new life. Outside of the classroom, the Jersey City native splits her time between conducting client assessments at the H&L Counseling Center in Queens and providing administrative support to the clinicians at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. On any given day, she can be helping determine a course of rehabilitative treatment for ex-convicts (an extension of her B.A. from Rutgers in Psychology and Criminal Justice) or scheduling appointment times for radiation treatments, all while hitting the books en route to her master's.
“I’m trying to keep myself busy and see where I fit,” Olivares explains. “I don’t know if I want to stay in the hospital setting or go into the educational system.” As she points out, “someone who has cancer can be kind of hopeless, so I think that’s the similarity between the kinds of patients or clients I speak with.” Her feeling is that she might wind up as a counselor at a high school or university but maintain her foothold part-time in a more clinical environment. Whatever the formula, Olivares’ goal is to combat issues like addiction and behavioral disorders at the source, thereby hopefully preventing individuals from reaching crisis levels as adults that are harder to treat and diagnose.
“My whole thing is I see a lot of kids get thrown into the [correctional] system very early,” she says. “And it sucks, because you have this label for the rest of your life. I would like to get to them before they have the chance to mess things up. It’s important to talk to them from a strength-based perspective, showing people, ‘You have your own resources inside you. You need to tap into those early on, especially if you’re in environments that are not really conducive to you growing up and reaching your full potential.’”
As Olivares can attest, social work is a continuum, so it only follows that her own journey has benefitted from the guidance of peers and professors. “I’ve searched for mentors,” she recalls. “When I was in college, I joined organizations, and the organizations had alumni who were very good mentors for me.” And yet other inspirational figures were right there all along. “My mom’s always been a mentor for me,” she adds. “She was a single mother. She came straight from Ecuador and was always a very strong, resilient female and did things for herself, and she instilled that in me at a very young age. That’s my foundation, and then from there I always searched for people who were strong, who were motivating.”
Whether looking to inspire adults who’ve gone down the wrong path or children seeking to transcend their surroundings, Olivares has developed one crucial piece of inspirational advice that could double as a mantra for social work itself: “Every moment is an opportunity to change your whole life.”
