Athena Viscusi, LCSW, is a Psychosocial Care Specialist at Doctors Without Borders. She's directed mental health programs in Haiti, South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, and Palestine. She's hired, trained and supervised local workers in refugee camps and worked with clients in cholera and Ebola treatment centers.

Prior to this, she was a community mental health provider in Washington, DC. She worked with immigrants and refugees, at a domestic violence shelter, and a homeless outreach and substance abuse treatment program. She also directed a gang intervention program that provided services to youth and their families.

Allison Peeler, LMSW, believes social workers need to drop the outdated story of "underworked and unpaid" and to redefine the way they view themselves and their earning capabilities.

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Valerie Arendt, MSW, MPP, discusses why it's so important for social workers to negotiate their salaries. Arendt is the Executive Director of NASW's North Carolina Chapter.

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Suze Orman is a New York Times best-selling author and smart money expert. She hosted the award-winning “Suze Orman Show” on CNBC for 13 years. Her books include "Women & Money," “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke” and “The Courage to be Rich.”

We spoke with her about balancing working in a helping profession and taking care of yourself first.

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Social work has the highest debt-to-salary ratio of any profession. Robert Schachter, DSW, LMSW, describes how social workers in New York City advocated for pay equity in one of the highest cost-of-living cities in the country.

Dr. Schachter served for 27 years as the Executive Director of the NASW New York City chapter.

Michael Sinclair, MSW, PhD, assistant professor at Morgan State University School of Social Work, often gets questions about pay from his students. Dr. Sinclair talks to us about why the social work pay landscape looks the way it does, and what can be done to change that.

This is the first in our series of episodes about social work salaries as part of Social Work Month 2019.

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Susan Munsey, LCSW, founded GenerateHope, which provides innovative programs for young women and teens who have survived the trauma of sex trafficking. Munsey is a trafficking survivor herself, and she's passionate about rescuing and rehabilitating women and educating people on this issue.

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Sean Erreger, LCSW, MSW, is a clinical case manager for children and youth at the New York State Office of Mental Health. He believes that for social workers who work with teens, striving to understand the social media that their clients are using is part of cultural competency.

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Mike Langlois, MSW, LICSW, is author of "Reset: Video Games & Psychotherapy." He is a gamer-affirmative therapist whose work focuses on gaming, social media, and the impact of social networks on relationships. Langlois encourages us to change our perspective of gaming and to understand that they can be very social in nature.

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Zander Keig, MSW, LCSW, is a clinical social work case manager on the U.S. Navy Medicine West Regional Transgender Care Team. He's a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and co-author of three books and several journal articles. He is also a transsexual man who transitioned in 2005.

His peers at the NASW California chapter named him Social Worker of the Year in 2018. He is chair of NASW's National Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues.

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