Drs. Shabnam Javdani and Erin Godfrey are seeking a project coordinator to provide full-time intervention  support on Systems Aligning for Equity (SAFE) Spaces, a clinical randomized control trial funded by The National Institute of Mental Health.  Every day, 100,000+ youth are held in confinement in the United States. After release, between 50% and 75% of them will return, causing family separation, educational displacement, and serious health and mental health challenges. The adult staff members charged with caring for youth during their confinement are a key factor in youth?s wellbeing, yet these staff experience burnout and distress at alarming rates.  

SAFE Spaces aims to address mental health disparities (e.g. suicide) across the juvenile legal and child welfare systems in New York City through providing counseling and coaching to staff to support their wellbeing, reduce burnout, and support their strengths and professional development.  The overall goal of SAFE Spaces is to understand whether and how supporting staff can create safer spaces for the youth under the staff?s care. SAFE Spaces is the first intervention of its kind to be launched and evaluated at a system-wide level, targeting the contexts in which juvenile legal system and child welfare youth reside through supporting staff. The primary goal of the Counseling and Coaching Assistant Project Coordinator will be to provide direct services counseling and coaching to staff in multiple facilities, and will support the coaching coordinator and supervisors in administrative tasks including: coordinating a team of counseling and coaching interns to provide direct services to staff, clinical data management, supporting the creation of psychoeducational materials, among other tasks.

The ideal candidate will have a strong interest in juvenile justice, child-welfare, social justice, and systems-level change, experience in community-based research and  interventions that support individuals from minoritized and often-excluded racial and ethnic backgrounds; experience in a strong desire to support a team of coaches; high professionalism (dependability, detail orientation, responsibility), willingness to learn and work on a variety of tasks, and interested in supporting clinical data management, intervention implementation and delivery, team management, peer supervision, and cross-study coordination. Strong interpersonal and communication skills, dedication to social equity, and clear organizational and project management skills are required. 

Specific responsibilities of the SAFE Spaces Assistant Intervention Coordinator include:

• Supporting management and organization of clinical and study data

• Supporting student coach/trainee recruitment, on-boarding, off-boarding

• Supervising peer coaches and counselors

• Supporting effective coach and counselor training, task delegation, monitoring and team-building activities

• Coordinating across study sub-teams (e.g. outreach, data collection)

• Assisting supervisors with effective safety-planning and timely crisis response

• Monitoring and tracking facility site and staff engagement in counseling and coaching activities via our data management system

• Facilitate individual supervision meetings for coaches and counselors with clinical supervisors

• Co-facilitate workshops for facility staff, implement intervention implementation logs

• Develop and refine the intervention manual based on evidence-based approaches

• Devise swift troubleshooting mechanisms for emergent issues that affect the quality and sustainability of the study

• Specific constellation of tasks will be determined upon hiring based on candidate qualifications, hours on the project, and project needs

Qualifications

• The candidate must have at least a Bachelor?s degree and currently obtaining a Masters or PhD in a practice-oriented field including psychology, social work, or a related field. Opportunities for gaining license-eligible clinical hours are possible. 

• Excellent interpersonal communication/rapport-building skills and ability to work with students.

• Experience with community-based research 

• Ability to work well independently and in a multidisciplinary team, excellent organization skills, attention to detail and excellent oral and written communication skills required.

• Comfort and capacity to work in a fast-paced team-oriented environment and communicate with a wide range of individuals, including juvenile legal and child welfare facility directors and staff, SAFE Spaces PIs, and intervention and research teams.

• Comfort traveling to all 5 boroughs of New York City is required

• Available to work  outside regular office hours, if needed

• Ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances

• Competence with Microsoft Suite (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

• Strong organizational skills and ability to manage multiple conflicting priorities.

• Familiarity with project management tools (e.g. Airtable, Trello, Asana, etc.) is a plus.

The hourly rate for this position is $18-$28.25/hour for 10-30 hours per week, commensurate candidate qualifications, project needs, and candidate needs for license eligible / supervised hours. Opportunities for gaining license-eligible clinical hours are possible.

This is a 100% in-person position. The position will begin in Summer 2023, in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. This position offers a number of excellent training opportunities, including collaboration with senior and junior members of the research team, exposure to university-community research partnerships, and experience with multi-setting intervention research. Access to a  rich array of NYU seminars, and special training workshops in research methods and statistics, and in areas of social justice, intervention/evaluation, implementation science, and gender-informed and settings-level approaches are also available.

In compliance with NYC's Pay Transparency Act, the hourly range for this position is $18-$28.25/hour. New York University considers factors such as (but not limited to) the specific grant funding and the terms of the research grant when extending an offer.

Per NYU's remote-work policy, this position is expected to be fully in-person.

To apply, send a cover letter including statement of interest, CV/resume, via Interfolio.

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