Jessica Aldrich Strassman, MSW, LCSW

Jesse Aldrich Strassman, MSW, LCSW, is a graduate of the Catholic University School of Social Work in Washington, DC, where she interned with the White House Domestic Policy Council and the Child Welfare League of America. Licensed in California since 2001, she currently operates a private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area working with adolescents and young adults. Jesse began her career working in the child welfare system focusing on permanency planning, especially for adolescents in foster care. She served as clinical supervisor and program director in several nonprofit foster care agencies overseeing and developing permanency programs for children. Much of her employment was based within LGBTQ+, bilingual, and multicultural foster care agencies.

Jesse is currently in the University of Pennsylvania’s DSW program as a 2024 doctoral candidate and expects to be ABD in May 2023. Her dissertation’s qualitative study explores how trauma narratives from a World War II population experiencing expulsion, flight, and immigration are experienced by subsequent generations. This is a cross-disciplinary study between SP2 and Penn’s history department exploring the need for clinicians to ground theory in a historical context when working with war, forced migration, and immigrant populations. Jesse also works with a faculty-led research team who received a 2022 grant from the Jews of Color Initiative to conduct a qualitative study entitled: Aging Jews of Color and their Lived Experiences of Resilience in Times of Social Unrest. She presented an oral paper, Re-Traumatization in Holocaust Survivors: Implications for Immigrant and Refugee Mental Health in Times of the Ukrainian Invasion, at the Society for Social Work and Research’s 2023 conference. She is the lead author on a 2022 publication, Everyone’s War Becomes My War: The Far-Reaching Impact of the Invasion of Ukraine. Jesse taught a MSW foundation course at the University of Nevada Reno in 2022 and currently works as a T.A. within SP2 offering writing support to master’s level SP2 students during the 2022-2023 school year.