Speaker Bio:
Alec Ross has worked in the field of clinical social work for over 40 years.  Working with children, adolescents, and families. He has provided a wide array of crisis intervention, early intervention, and prevention services as well as clinical treatment to individuals, couples, families, and groups.  Currently, Al is the Senior Director of Clinical Practice at Juvenile Protective Association (JPA) providing ongoing supervision and training for the agency’s clinical staff and interns, including teacher consultation and school-based therapy, in several Chicago South Side and West Side neighborhoods.  In addition to his work at JPA, he maintains a small private practice, mostly focused on providing clinical services for people confronting and encountering addiction related issues.

Al was fortunate to have experienced training in Narrative Therapy over the course of a decade with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, as well as Michael White and David Epston. He continues to teach Narrative Therapy as well as a myriad of other clinical courses at several master’s level institutions in the Chicago area.  He is deeply committed to the field of clinical social work practice and is passionate about what differentiates clinical social work practice from our colleagues in other clinical disciplines. Recognizing and integrating the socio-political context in our thinking around the development of the person, the evolution of problematic experiences and clinical approaches that embrace the larger context, is, in his mind, a significant difference in terms of how we look at and address the human condition in all our work.