Lori-Anne Wunschel has logged more than 15 years working in social services and addiction counseling, helping countless clients, many with major traumas and minimal means.
For the past nine years, she has worked at Woonsocket’s nonprofit Community Care Alliance, helping adults with “severe and persistent” mental illness and substance use disorders.
As for career advancement, Wunschel, now a team leader for CCA’s community support program, has made it as far as her own financial circumstances will allow, a bachelor’s degree in psychology and justice studies and later a state-issued license to treat chemical dependency.
She would have gone further and sought a master’s degree in social work, but like many people, earning money today took precedence over advancement tomorrow.
“I’ve always wanted to go back and further my education,” she said. “But this is not a very high-paying field. It wasn’t feasible at the time.”
Luckily for Wunschel, a state-run program launched in 2022 has provided the path. The pilot Health Professional Equity Initiative – a 62-credit “credential attainment” program administered by the R.I. Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner in partnership with the R.I. Executive Office of Health and Human Services and Rhode Island College – will pay her way, charging her nothing but the time and effort.
The program was “an absolute lifesaver,” said Wunschel, who is now one of 20 participants in the program’s inaugural cohort, which began in the fall of 2022.
She was provided with a $20,000 stipend that can be used for tuition, school supplies and transportation costs. Other allowable uses include child care and car repairs.
Wunschel is appreciative that her fellow awardees, like her, already have experience as behavioral health care providers. They’ve formed a tight unit, she says, working their day jobs and attending classes at night.
“We tend to have classes together. Even some of my co-workers are in the same classes,” she said. “Now we know all the faces. We’ve done projects together. And if we have questions, we tend to bounce them off each other.”
Funded by a federal $3 million American Rescue Plan Act grant, this first cohort is expected to graduate in 2025. With her master’s degree in social work in hand, Wunschel will be able to rise further in the nonprofit ranks. She said she plans to remain at Community Care Alliance.
“This will allow me to explore other opportunities,” she said, and she hopes to use her newfound skills in a sector that was already reeling well before the pandemic arrived and sent many vulnerable clients on the margins over the edge.
Many are still fighting to make up for lost progress.
“The stigma is still in place around mental illness,” she said. “The pandemic was really hard on our field. [Those seeking help] had to stay home. It was challenging to [rely so much on] telehealth.”
R.I. Postsecondary Commissioner Shannon Gilkey said the equity program, and others like it, are meant to address “noncollege-related barriers to enrollment, persistence and completion.”
Some of the most common impediments, according to Gilkey, are the lack of internet or computer, and reliable transportation. Other “wraparound” services include pairing enrollees with an educational adviser.
“Clearly, there is a need for wraparound services, and we continue to actively seek diverse funding streams, public and private, state and federal, to continue serving students in need,” he said.
In Rhode Island, a master’s degree accredited by the Council on Social Work Education is necessary to become a licensed clinical social worker. According to state labor data, the health care and social assistance sector is the state’s largest, employing 76,600 workers.
Typically, paraprofessionals earn lower wages, have higher turnover rates and are disproportionately women and racial minorities. Office of Postsecondary Education data shows that a master’s degree, on average, leads to $20,000 in additional annual earnings.
The equity initiative is designed to address these “systemic barriers” and the dearth of career pathways in this field. Program literature also cites “a lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate services for patients and clients,” which can hamper successful treatment.
State officials agree that those seeking counseling services and other interventions do better when working with someone with whom they personally identify. And this isn’t only a sociocultural matter. It’s often practical.
“People do feelings in their native language,” said Rick Brooks, EOHHS director of health care transformation.
Demographic changes in the health care field have not kept pace with statewide shifts, Brooks says.
“Licensed jobs continue to show disparities. That’s a critical problem for the patients that we serve,” he said. “We need to … be very proactive in increasing the diversity of the health professional workforce.
“It’s not for everybody,” he added. “These are physically and emotionally demanding jobs. But they are rewarding. And meaningful.”
(Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the organizations administering the Health Professional Equity Initiative. It is being administered by the R.I. Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner in partnership with the R.I. Executive Office of Health and Human Services and Rhode Island College.)
