by Karisa Barrow, Psy.D.

I am enthusiastic about moving into the role of President-Elect after six rewarding years on NCSPP's Education Committee. I bring organizational experience as founder of inMind, a group practice invested in providing Bay Area psychotherapy, assessment, training and consultation services from a relational and integrated contemporary psychoanalytic approach. More recently, I served as president of Alameda County Psychological Association.

It is my honor to introduce to you the winner of the Community Service Award, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft. She has demonstrated exemplary service in our community, most recently through her pioneering work with Mind the Gap, The Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and Gender Spectrum. Mind the Gap is a community of gender affirmative therapists focused on developing assessment tools and practices for work with gender nonconforming, gender diverse, and transgender children and youth. Dr. Ehrensaft is also founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, which provides comprehensive interdisciplinary services and advocacy to gender nonconforming/transgender youth and their families. In addition, she serves on the board of Gender Spectrum, a Bay Area-based organization offering educational, training, and advocacy services that promote gender acceptance for youth of all genders. Dr. Ehrensaft is instrumental in organizing the annual summer Gender Spectrum Professional Development Day for clinicians interested in understanding more about working with gender expansive children.  

Dr. Ehrensaft has provided support services in many other capacities as well. She is a founding member of A Home Within, which provides pro bono psychotherapy to children in foster care "for as long as it takes." She is also a founding member of the research/study group on reproductive technology at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Finally, she has published numerous books and articles supporting her tremendous work in our community.

Dr. Ehrensaft has been pushing the boundaries of traditional psychoanalytic teaching and framing contemporary psychodynamic practices for many years. Her dedication to underserved and marginalized children and families stands apart.

I am also pleased to announce the winner of the Student Paper Award, Daniel Butler. His paper, entitled "'Falling Through the Cracks': Precarity, Precocity, and Other Neoliberal Pressures in the Lives of Graduate Students," is a moving exploration of the economic and entrepreneurial pressures on millennial and post-millennial clinical trainees. Butler is a recent graduate of Santa Clara University School of Counseling Psychology, and his undergraduate studies focused on continental philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.