NYU Silver School of Social Work

As the Director of Community Mobilization Programs for the Latino Commission on AIDS since he graduated from NYU Silver, Luis Alberto Mares Yáñez, MSW ’17, annually plans, develops, and implements National Latino AIDS Awareness Day and National Hispanic Hepatitis Awareness Day. In his role, he coordinates with partners in every state and U.S. territory to provide education, outreach, training, and create awareness and reduce stigma around these infectious diseases in the Latino community. For his efforts, POZ Magazine recognized him in 2022 as one of the POZ 100 Latino advocates who have made exemplary contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Inspired by her Interpersonal Psychotherapy professor, Victoria Juste, MSW ’24, came up with the idea of a gift box product to support Black expectant parents through the course of pregnancy with the overall goal of helping to reduce Black maternal mortality. Her resulting product, Melanated Mom & Pop Box, is one of four winners of NYU’s 2022 Blackstone LaunchPad Ideas Competition. With support from NYU’s Entrepreneurial Institute, Victoria is moving on with other campus-level winners across the country to the Network Round of the competition with the chance to win additional prize money to further develop her idea.

While earning his degree at Silver, Michael Sanders (front row center), MSW ’19—father, army veteran, and entrepreneur—was the vice president of the NYU Military Alliance, an NYU Social Sector Leadership Diversity Fellow, a Silver Student Leadership Council Fellow, a member of the Students of Color Collective, and one of two students on the School’s Social Justice Praxis Committee. Michael, who is now a Social Service Advocate at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Boston, observed, “Being a social worker means fighting for social justice and never forgetting our responsibility to our clients, to ourselves, and to society as a whole.”

As chair of the working group of experts supporting the Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health, Dean Michael A. Lindsey led the production of a report titled Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide, which informed the bipartisan Pursuing Equity in Mental Health Act. Now he’s leading an National Institutes of Health-funded  study testing a system of care for Black youth presenting at NYC hospital emergency departments that combines suicide risk screening with an intervention to help connect at-risk youth to quality mental health services.

Professor Michelle R. Munson has made it her mission to help the mental health system better respond to marginalized young adults whose mental health challenges, if left untreated, impede their ability to form relationships, hold jobs, live independently, and function well in society.