Co-host Em talks with Andi Walsh about legal care in psychedelic social work. Roundtable participants Em, Ben, and Sara talk access, bringing politics into integration, and Bejeweled™.
Amanda "Andi" M. Walsh is an attorney and social worker by training, or as she likes to say, “a lawyer with a social worker’s heart.” Her passion is to promote healing for communities through systems and policy change, a passion that is rooted in her and her family’s story of multigenerational trauma and poverty. Her educational and professional experience is also rooted in this lived experience with a focus on legal aid, policy, advocacy, and program and organizational development. She is particularly drawn to innovative, holistic, and relational models of care that not only provides healing tools at the individual and family levels, but also addresses the systemic barriers interfering with those same healing goals (also known as social determinants of health).
As a first-generation college student, she completed her undergraduate studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she designed an interdisciplinary major in “Justice and Mental Health” and a minor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. She then received her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she was a Civitas ChildLaw Fellow and completed certificates in Child and Family Law and Public Interest Law. She also obtained her Master of Social Work (M.S.W.) in Mental Health and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Health Law and Policy, also from Loyola.
Following her graduate studies, Andi stayed in Chicago working first as a legal aid attorney for families living in poverty facing mental health challenges and then moved into policy as head of the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership. In summer 2023, Andi moved to eastern Oregon, where she now works as the Senior Health Policy Advisor for the Children’s Institute. In this role, she continues to advocate for policies and systems to address the health needs and overall stability for children and families statewide, particularly through an intergenerational lens.
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Music by the Groovy Tad Nicol