Hafsatu Stevens is our DECI Clinical Advocate at the Family Center. Haffie has worked with us since October of 2022 and has her MSW from Simmons University. Her responsibilities include working with families, agency staff, and community partners as a conduit for information and sharing resources, data, and communication with the local stakeholders across Plymouth County as an advocate for drug endangered children. Haffie also assists families, youth, and communities impacted by substance use disorders through identifying and accessing supportive services designed to improve family functioning.
Haffie believes the Family Center is different because of its diversity. “As a whole, the staff are a good representation in demographics, and are living in similar communities as the participants that we serve. In other words, staff are relatable, and because of the multi-language speaking staff that FRC Brockton hosts, language is not a barrier that restricts participants from receiving the help and care that they well-deserve.”
Haffie is excited to join the Family Center staff “because it allows me to impact families in a positive and effective way. I get to help individuals, families, and communities enhance their quality of life through counseling, advocacy, and therapeutic engagement. In other words, I am devoted to helping clients revamp parts of their lives for the better. I empower participants who struggle with all unique life obstacles to live fulfilling and independent lives. Yes, I want my clients to live out their best lives! This job allows me to speak life into participants along with exercising my outreach, advocacy, direct service skills. I get to give back to communities that gave so much to me.”
Haffie describes building rapport and creating safe spaces with and for participants, developing healthy relationships with participants, collaboratively working with participants in their treatment and helping participants find healing and peace through valuable interactions, meaningful relationships, and therapeutic work as her favorite parts of her job.
When asked about a time she truly made a difference in her work or the community, Haffie shared a beautiful and touching recollection:
“When I was the first healthy role model for a 13 year old teen girl. I was the person she opened up to about her low self-esteem along with her suicidal ideation. Working with her, I was able to speak life into her, and her situation while fostering a healthy relationship with her. She viewed me as her refuge and was always in my office after school because she viewed it as her "safe home". Because I was her confidant and safe person, it allowed me to get her the proper treatment for her suicidal ideation along with other concerns she was battling, and there she met great peers, and finally she did not feel alone for the very first time. She is now a living testimony of how words of encouragement, along with the power of words, and great rapport can really save a soul.”
If Haffie could make one, big, positive change to the world, it would be practicing the ideas stated in the Code of Ethics, by pursuing social change on the behalf of oppressed people through providing services and promoting cultural and ethnic diversity. Haffie loves to travel and spend time with family and friends, and also being spontaneous. “I look for humor in anything, including myself.”