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Let’s Talk Real Talk
April 12, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
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About the panel:
Linda Russell, M.A. LMFT (she/her) Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for over twenty years, Linda is the Care Coordinator and one of the Integrated Behavioral Health providers at the John Muir Family Residency Program in Walnut Creek. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Fordham University (NY) and a Masters in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, CA. Early training focused on working with emotionally disturbed children and their families – in San Francisco and in Marin City. She shifted to working with substance use and HIV with a community agency in the East Bay, then moved to Public Health, with the Contra Costa CountyAIDS Program. Eventually becoming a Medical Social Worker at CC Regional In Martinez, Linda worked both in the hospital and the PH clinics, first with HIV services, and later with Oncology and Palliative Care. She received the Ruth Pease Award, an annual recognition by medical staff to a non-physician for their dedication to patient care. Palliative Care is one of Linda’s passions, teaching patients and families to have the difficult conversations at sensitive times in their lives, centering the patient’s voice and widening the involvement and participation of their support network. She is faculty (non-core) at the residency program and Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Advocacy Committee at the residency. She recently began a small private practice.
Patricia E. Craven, LMFT, SEP, CFRC, has held myriad roles, in both her personal and professional life. She has provided psychotherapy, counseling, training and support to people in various communities. In the Bay Area since 1978. During this time, she has held a strong commitment to understanding and addressing issues in people’s lives through a social justice lens. How well she has done such has been informed and at times limited by her own identity as a white, cisgender queer female, raised in a multi-racial poor/working class home. She has been acutely aware of how one’s position in society impacts the experience of mental health and the receiving of mental health services. Patricia is the Co-Founder and recently retired Executive Director at Heart in Balance Counseling and Training Center in Oakland. She founded this agency in 2004, to provide affordable and sliding scale services from an Integrative approach to psychotherapy and to support and training up and coming psychotherapist to hold a integrative and social justice model in working with clients.
Cris Avila, LMFT, is a Licensed Marriage Family Therapist serving the Bay Area since 2009. Cris Avila practices from a Transpersonal Somatic orientation and has worked in diverse settings and populations ranging from providing therapy in preschool setting, school day treatment program, in community based agencies, has worked with adults in crisis stabilization program and in outpatient-hospital mental health department setting. Cris Avila is currently in private practice and specializes in healing from trauma. Cris was born in the United States of Mexico and came to the United States of America as a teenager. Cris was raised Catholic but found profound spiritual connection with Andean cosmovision and ancestral practices both from Peru and Mesoamerica.