Clarencetine Brooks

Clarencetine (Teena), LMSW, M.Phil., ABD (she, her, hers) will be teaching Advocacy in Social Work Practice. She worked for over a decade with the Urban Justice Center, an innovative nonprofit that serves New York City’s most vulnerable residents through a combination of direct legal services, systemic advocacy, community education, and political organizing. In this position, she worked to support the development of impact litigation and develop public policy and community organizing strategies to address the criminalization of people with mental health conditions. In this role, she also worked closely with statewide and national organizations, such as the Alliance for Rights and Recovery and Community Access, to advocate for legislation created to improve the lives of people with behavioral health conditions.

In her current role as the Assistant Director of the Office of Consumer Affairs at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Teena works to ensure that the voices of individuals with lived experience of mental health and substance use conditions are heard in government policy and planning. Her current scope of work at DOHMH includes working on initiatives regarding Medicaid Managed Care, Equity, and Trauma-Informed Care.

Teena is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the Social Welfare program. Her research interests include Black/African American women’s health, sexual minority women of color health, intersectionality, trauma-responsive organizational readiness, and the impact of diabetes on the Black/African American community.