Cassandra has worked across the government, community and non-government sectors since graduating as a social worker in 2001. Previously, she has worked as a social worker, program coordinator, operational manager, clinical services manager and allied health manager, supporting young people and their families with the most acute needs. Currently, Cassandra is responsible for directing the ACT Health Directorate’s Youth at Risk Project, developing and delivering training in trauma informed practice, facilitating changes to policy to ensure the ACT mental health sector understands and implements trauma informed principles and co-designing a new trauma service to meet the needs of young people in ACT.
As a social worker, Cassandra began her career in the NGO sector in 2000, and transitioned to the community sector with Canberra Health Services (CHS) in 2001, working across CHS, Community Services Directorate, and ACT Health Directorate since then. From early in her career, she has prioritised the needs and advancement of young people, particularly those who have experienced mental ill health and trauma. She has been flexible in her ways of working, innovative in her practice to engage young people, persistent in her work with managers and executives to challenge ways of working that were not effective for young people, inclusive of young people with lived experience of trauma and mental ill health in her design and co-design of programs and truly inspiring in her consistent quest for knowledge, research and evidence-based practice in what works best for young people and their recovery.
Cassandra has also been a supervisor and peer leader for other social workers and policy directors in the ACT who work with young people. In this capacity she has been an outstanding role model. She demonstrates best practice in every facet of the advice she provides and advocacy role she takes on for young people in the care of her colleagues or who will be participants in the programs they are designing. Cassandra is widely respected by her colleagues across the ACT. She shares her knowledge willingly and widely, and is highly regarded as an expert in trauma informed practice nation-wide, regularly publishing her research findings, such as in the ACT Position Statement on Trauma Informed Practices for Children and Young People (tabled in the ACT Legislative Assembly in 2023) and presenting at national and international conferences and events, such as the 2018 International Childhood Trauma Conference.
