ACORN

Yoli Flores is the Neighborhood Empowerment Manager at Lines for Life. She is a community advocate ensuring equitable mental health access to the Latino/x/e community. She specializes in working with the Spanish-speaking communities in the Portland metro area and rural Oregon. With an educational background in public health and with her personal experience, Yoli understands the cultural, structural, and personal barriers to achieving mental health.

Teresa McDowell, Ed.D., LMFT is a professor emerita at Lewis & Clark, in Portland, Oregon, where she served as Department Chair and co-founded Lewis & Clark’s Problem Gambling Services. Dr. McDowell has served as a licensed marriage and family therapist, family therapy educator, program director, educational administrator, and consultant over the past 40 years. Her work has primarily focused on counselor education and workforce development, organizational consultation, international family therapy, equity-based clinical practice, integrated treatment for problem gambling, and clinical supervision. She currently serves as a social researcher, program evaluator, and consultant with Partners in Social Research and is the senior instructor for the Advanced Career Online Resource Network (ACORN). Dr. McDowell has published over 50 refereed journal articles and book chapters. She has presented her work at numerous conferences across eight countries. She is the author of Applying Critical Social Theory to Family Therapy Practice and first co-author of Socioculturally Attuned Family Therapy: Guidelines for Equity-Based Theory and Practice (1st and 2nd Editions). Her work in problem gambling treatment includes authoring the Working with Families in Problem Gambling Treatment handbook, research on core competencies for problem gambling counselors and prevention specialists, and extensive contributions to the development of Oregon’s problem gambling treatment workforce.

Advocate and educator, Kitty Martz, CGRM, CGAC-II, MBA is the Executive Director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery in Portland, Oregon and president of the Oregon Council on Problem Gambling. As a person with lived experience in gambling harm, Ms. Martz is a Certified Gambling Recovery Mentor and also Certified Gambling Addiction Counselor II, longstanding SMART Recovery facilitator, Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist and she is trained by The Beck Institute Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in suicide prevention. Kitty works directly with peers to support their gambling recovery, develops curriculums, establishes procedural frameworks, and offers funny and engaging training seminars on a national level. Her passion is participating in the evolution of legislative policies as they relate to mitigating publicly operated gambling harm. She can be reached at www.vpgr.net.