Shari has been working in the Special Care Counseling field for about 18 years. She has worked in a variety of settings and with a variety of people, from residential group homes for children and youth to women’s shelters, schools, and community-based settings. Shari’s expertise is in working from a holistic client-centred approach with the marginalized members of our society – the socially excluded, the homeless, and with people with mental health issues, drug dependency issues and social adjustment problems. Shari is very much looking forward to working with you and sharing the knowledge which we all bring to the learning experience.

Testimonial

My name is Shari Levine, and I’m a content specialist in Special Care Counselling.

Question: What’s the most rewarding aspect of participating in RAC for SCC, as a candidate?

I think it’s for them to have a better sense of what being a special care counsellor is, so I think it’s a nice marriage or blend of their practical experience, and again having that theoretical foundation to operate from, which I think deepens their ability to intervene with their clients, and again gives them that ability to also talk about what they’re doing with other people, to have that vocabulary. I think particularly they feel that they can be taken more seriously in their work, that they can dialogue with other multidisciplinary members and be taken more seriously because they do have more of a theoretical foundation to operate from.

Question: What do you like about working for RAC?

I really like meeting the different candidates and seeing a variety of different backgrounds and experiences, and helping people to recognize their competencies, their skills, and help them to – even bring up their self-confidence to a whole other level, because very often they’re doing the work but they don’t have the theoretical foundation or the terminology, or the lingo, to really express themselves as well as they could be, so it’s really fun to kind of fill in that information for them, and watch them blossom as special care counsellors.

Question:  What are the biggest reasons behind RAC’s success, in your opinion?

I definitely think it’s our ability to tailor the process to the candidate’s needs specially, I think we’re very flexible in the way we work with candidates. So some candidates are very independent, very autonomous, and we can allow that, whereas others need a little bit more support and hand holding, and we can also offer that, and we can be flexible in terms of the schedule in that it can work beyond the 9 to 5, and we personalize it quite a bit.