Erica Coates, LCSW

ACTIVE MEMBER • CRM Coordinator, Embedded Counselor CLAHS

Cook Counseling Center, Virginia Tech

Webpage

coates17@vt.edu

Erica is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who serves as Cook Counseling Center's Coordinator of the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) and Embedded Counselor at VT. She has overseen one of the first initiatives within higher education seeking to infuse CRM across the entire campus of 36,000 students and many thousand employees. Since launching in Spring 2023 with 20 CRM trainers, CRM has reached over 10,000 members of our campus and over 50 departments, working to bolster our ability to regulate our nervous system in the moment and have language to share with others to enhance connection and expand resiliency. Erica obtained her Bachelors in Psychology with minors in Music and Spanish from Anderson University in 2004, and her Masters in Social Work from Syracuse University in 2009. She has worked in clinical, administrative, supervisory and program development roles in various human service agencies in different sectors.  The joy of her career has been building multi-disciplinary initiatives to solve complex problems.  At Cook Counseling Center, she helped found and develop the Inclusion Diversity and Equity Advancement Team at Cook Counseling Center and has supervised a number of social workers pursuing clinical licensure. She is serving on several research teams evaluating CRM's efficacy with diverse populations. In her clinical work she feels it is a profound privilege to facilitate growth and healing in others as they discover their own resilience through hardships and injustices. She has organized training for 10 individuals at Virginia Tech to also become Trauma Resiliency Model-trained clinicians through the Trauma Resource Institute. 

Prior to joining Virginia Tech in 2017, Erica worked in clinical, programmatic and supervisory roles alongside local DSS departments in New York at a non-profit contracted program of DSS, and in North Carolina through Intensive In Home services, both to prevent out of home placement of children and teens. She has led initiatives on culturally sensitive care within child welfare programming. In Asheville, North Carolina she co-founded the Spanish-Speaking Clinical Collaborative, which grew to gather 100 different helpers within a 2 county catchment area, to bolster connectivity across silos and thus strengthen resource provision for Spanish speakers. She has had the privilege of visiting the homes of hundreds of families in her career, from inner-city housing projects, to apartments housing brand-new immigrants, to long gravel driveways in far flung Appalachian hollers. She is grateful for the opportunity to see so many ways that people help one another and get their needs met.