A Career Built on Giving Back
For Talyah, social work isn’t something she stumbled into — it’s something she grew into, shaped by her own experiences as a young person navigating challenges and then choosing to walk back through those same doors as a guide for others.
From Participant to Program Supervisor
As a middle schooler, Talyah was a participant in a Bridge Partnership program, which is a community-based initiative designed to support young people facing adversity. Years later, she came back, this time as staff. She spent four or five summers working in the program during her undergraduate years, and it was there that a program supervisor saw something in her and pushed her to go further.
“She pushed me to keep moving forward,” Talyah reflects. That encouragement clarified what she already felt: a pull toward working with adolescents facing real challenges — the kind she understood from the inside.
She earned her BA in 2020 and her MSW in 2022. After exploring an ABA therapy role that didn’t feel like the right fit, she found her place at Eliot’s Douglas Academy in New Bedford.
Meeting Young Men Where They Are
Douglas Academy is a treatment-focused, step-down program for juvenile boys — many with DCF and DYS involvement, histories of high truancy, or prior arrests. The program is built around the belief that community reintegration, not just detention, is the path forward.
Talyah’s social work functions across two tracks. On Track 1, young men in 90-day stays work through structured therapeutic programming: weekly individual therapy sessions, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), identity exploration, SMART goal planning, and family and life skills work. They learn to identify their triggers, build relationship skills, and create plans for their future. As they progress, supervised community outings and eventually independent community access become part of the journey.
Track 2 serves young men preparing for pre-independent living — those who may lack stable home supports or who face risks like gang affiliation in their home communities. Here, Talyah’s role shifts toward clinical check-ins, goal setting and achievement support, and hands-on case management.
Building a Career with Purpose
Talyah is currently working toward her LCSW, with plans to pursue her LICSW. She’s focused on continuing to grow at Eliot and within the field, building on a foundation that was laid, in many ways, long before she ever started graduate school.
Her story is a reminder that those best equipped to help young people through hard moments often know, from lived experience, that it’s possible to come through the other side.
