Dr. Tiffany Brown (she/her), a licensed marriage and family therapist, is a Senior Lecturer II and Clinical Director in the Couples and Family Therapy graduate program. She is also the Director of the Center for Healthy Relationships in the HEDCO Clinic. Her main clinical and research focus is substance use and recovery, collegiate recovery programs, and self-harm. More recently, she brings these interests together as she studies the intersection of mental health, athletic systems, and athletes. As a first-generation college student, she knows the challenges associated with navigating the demands of college and graduate school. 

Brown’s current research investigates the mental health needs of female identified athletes through qualitative research and a soon to be published book (publisher: Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Hachette Book Group). Also notable, Brown’s research has investigated the effectiveness of collegiate recovery programs for supporting students. Brown received training in substance use and recovery through the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery at Texas Tech University. She is committed to providing advocacy for people in recovery in hopes to shift the social stigma attached to substance use issues, including the importance of discussing the racist, sexist, and ineffective history of the ‘war on drugs.’ Brown has worked with SAMHSA to support the development and sustainability of collegiate recovery programs via Bringing Recovery Supports to Scale Technical Assistance Center Strategy (BRSS TACS). Her clinical experience includes self-harm education, prevention, and intervention and the family dynamics of substance use and recovery. As part of an intensive internship at a pediatric hospital, Brown gained significant experiences with grief and loss, pediatric oncology, and pediatric intensive care. She was trained in the principles of medical family therapy with interdisciplinary medical teams. In addition, she regularly consults with schools and community programs regarding best practices for screening and intervening with individuals struggling with self-harming behaviors. Brown is a clinical fellow and Approved Supervisor with the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) and an approved supervisor in the state of Oregon.

After a mass shooting in her hometown of Roseburg, Oregon in 2015, Brown joined a small statewide, multidisciplinary taskforce to provide crisis support for survivors and community members. She worked at the site of the shooting for several months to support students, faculty, and staff to navigate the intersection of surviving trauma and immediate coping. Like most mass traumas, those that are intimately impacted often experience a sense of isolation and disorientation as the rest of the world carries on. For this reason, she consults with therapists who are working with mass shooting survivors.

Brown is active in the local community, serving on several non-profit boards. Currently, she is on the advisory board for Courageous Kids (grief support program for youth). Brown previously served as the treasurer of the Association of Recovery in Higher Education (ARHE), the president for Carry it Forward (providing resources to unhoused community members), and board member for Ophelia’s Place (prevention based organization for girl-identified youth). 

Commitment to Anti-Racism and Social Justice
I wish that writing up my commitment to anti-racism could truly be captured in a paragraph. It’s quite a paradox to reduce my commitment and actions to a few sentences, as my personal expectation is that it’s embedded and integrated across all of my roles and activities. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like singular actions that can be listed, but more a stance and value system. As an educator, my aim is to cultivate a learning environment that is justice seeking and equitable for all students and colleagues. I want my leadership to demonstrate ways that, as a white, cis, able-bodied person with many unearned privileges, there are ways to utilize my power to elevate others and decenter myself. I like to call this “using my powers for good.”

Not only do I hold unearned power and privileges, but I was given power as an academic. I live in a community that fully embraces me because of my identities. I am celebrated for adding a Black Lives Matter poster to a window of my home. I can be celebrated and held in high regard for each performative act. But I am not interested in performative justice. I want my research, teaching, supervision, service, administration, and advising to be grounded in anti-racism and critical consciousness. This means being truly focused and intentional about the unique intersectional identities of students, colleagues, and the clients in our clinic. I am interested in continuously finding ways to call attention to injustice and inviting collective change. As part of that practice, I actively decentralize whiteness in effort to decolonialize the spaces I occupy. And this practice is not enough. Not nearly enough. More white people talking about their equity work is not the same as faculty of color being fully supported or Indigenous scholars being elevated in the academy. Or minoritized students finding themselves in their textbooks as the scholars whose ideas are being named as best practice.

Across my work, I think about who is invited to the conversation, who is not present, and who has access to what the system is offering. What identities are being centered right now, even if none are overtly being mentioned?