NYU Silver School of Social Work

Cristina Favaro always had a passion for working with children, especially during their early years, but her path to doing so was anything but linear. Fortunately, she found her calling in social work. Now, as a new NYU Silver MSW graduate, she has accepted a position in the inaugural cohort of The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services’ Social Work Residency, where she will work with babies, toddlers, and young children with behavioral, developmental, and emotional difficulties.

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, was one of four winners of NYU’s 2022 Blackstone LaunchPad Ideas Competition. With support from NYU’s Entrepreneurial Institute, Victoria moved 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.

“Age discrimination is bad for people and it’s bad for the economy,” Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Health and Aging Innovation Ernest Gonzales said in invited testimony to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. As the global population continues to age, research by Dr. Gonzales, who also directs our MSW program, is informing policies and programs that optimize health, economic security, and strong social bonds for older adults and across generations.