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Dr. Sandy Gibson is a distinguished Professor at The College of New Jersey, where she has been a dedicated faculty member for nearly 14 years. She has significantly contributed to the academic community through her roles as a Professor, Associate Professor, and Lecturing Professor, specializing in graduate-level research methods and clinical practice courses. Her passion for education and commitment to her students is evident in her long tenure and the impact she has had on countless aspiring professionals.
In addition to her academic career, Dr. Gibson is the Principal Owner of Crossing Wellness, LLC, a private practice she established in January 2022. With a focus on addiction counseling and harm reduction, she provides compassionate care to clients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Crossing Wellness operates under the philosophy that “People start to heal the moment they feel heard,” highlighting Dr. Gibson’s dedication to empathetic and effective therapeutic practices.
Dr. Gibson’s professional journey also includes her role as President of Gibson Group Social Research, where she has been leading social research initiatives and program evaluations since 2005. Her expertise extends to grant writing and professional development seminars, making her a versatile and influential figure in her field. With previous teaching roles at Rutgers University and Cabrini College, Dr. Gibson’s extensive experience and unwavering commitment to social work and counseling have made her a respected authority in addiction counseling and social research.
The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) is a prestigious, highly selective institution known for its commitment to academic excellence. Established in 1855 as the New Jersey State Normal School, TCNJ has evolved into a leading public higher education institution, consistently recognized as one of the top comprehensive colleges in the nation. Ranked as the No. 1 public institution in the northern region by U.S. News & World Report and listed among the 75 “Most Competitive” schools by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, TCNJ also boasts a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, an honor held by less than 10 percent of colleges nationally.
Susan: Hello and welcome to the Women’s Roundtable podcast, powered by the Think Factory, where we learn how women think big and grow their business. My name is Susan Kleiner. I’m a partner with Outside General Counsel Solutions, and I’m the host of today’s episode. I’m happy to have with me here today, Dr. Sandy Gibson. She’s got her Ph.D., LC, CW and LCA DC and she’s a professor with the College of New Jersey. She received her master’s in PTSD and social work from the University of Maryland with a specialization in addictions. She worked as an addiction counselor for six years, and then she completed her Ph.D. in social work and became a study director at a research institute and temple at Temple University for seven years. And that’s where she developed and evaluated addiction prevention and treatment programing. In 2010, she became faculty at TMJ, and she does a lot of great work there, which we’re going to hear more about. She also recently finished a study exploring how the use of Narcan to save someone’s life or have one’s own life saved affects drug use behavior change in the future. And she’s actively working to promote harm reduction and a shift from criminal justice to public health to a public health-based approach to drug use in New Jersey, including a push for the full decriminalization of drugs. So, I want to welcome Dr. Sandy Gibson to the podcast.
Sandy: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
So, getting a master’s in counseling is usually if you’re going full time, a 2 to 3-year process. If it’s two years, it’s two years. You know, spring, summer, winter, fall, the whole thing. So, most people do it in about three years, and that means you have to take another three years after you graduate from your bachelor’s. So now you’re talking seven years of not being in the workforce, seven years of debt accrual, paying for tuition. And so, it’s very time consuming and it’s very expensive. And one of the challenges as it’s not a very lucrative job to have once you finish. And so, you have to put this enormous financial investment into securing the degree that’s required to do the work. And then you get a job that pays you very little. And you have all of this debt now that you’ve accrued in order to achieve this level of degree in your life. So as a result of that, the counseling profession is overwhelmingly white, and we have a lot of what we what are referred to as mental health communities and stands for health professionals shortage areas. So, we have lots of communities where we have basically mental health deserts where people don’t have access to care, not near where they live. And that creates a lot of challenges in a community. And most of our mental health communities are located in black and brown communities. So, there’s an inequity of access to the education, and there’s an inequity in terms of access to good quality mental health care in your community. And so, our program is designed to with a target population we’re working for. So, anybody can apply to our program. But our mission and what we’re trying to accomplish is to partner with mental health agencies, services, hospitals, people who have a behavioral health component to their operation and to support people in non-clinical staff, behaviorist case managers, peer recovery specialists, health navigators to help those individuals secure their master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling while they’re working. So instead, we’re upending the academic calendar entirely. So, it’s just very different than anything you’ve seen before. We’re going to have three terms a year. We go all year long. There’s no summer break. There’s no spring break. We are working folks who want to get done. We want to finish the degree so that we can take the new job and have the higher income and start building towards our clinical license. So, we’re not dragging this out for years and years and years. So, we have three terms a year, but every term as in A and B session. So instead of taking four courses all fall and having four classes to go to every week and four sets of homeworks and tests and papers, we do two seven-week sessions so that you have. Two classes and then another two classes. So, during the entirety of this program, you will never take more than two classes at the same time, but you’ll still be able to secure this entire degree in two years. We have wonderful grants, one from the Tepper Foundation, one from Accelerate the Future Foundation that have allowed us to reduce the cost of this degree from the traditional 54 or -41. But if you work currently in a mental health community, it’s 31. Or if you graduated from an HBCU, it’s 31. Because our goal is to bring more counselors into the field, because research also shows that individuals appreciate having someone who shares their lived expertise when they’re seeking a counseling relationship. So, we want to try to build access to counselors in the field.
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