Andrea W. Westbrook
Andrea W. Westbrook (she/her) has been a registered social worker for almost 15 years, predominantly working in the downtown east of Toronto within the HIV sector, community mental health, and with people who are street-involved. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCADU, a Bachelor of Social Work from Toronto Metropolitan University, and a Master of Social Work from the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at University of Toronto. She is currently a PhD Candidate at Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work with a research focus on non-policing, community-based mental health crisis interventions.
She has extensive experience in harm reduction, alternative community safety models, and accessible mental health programming, and has held leadership roles in program development, clinical supervision, and crisis response, including managing one of the inaugural Toronto Community Crisis Service teams. She currently works at York University as the Manager of Complex Communities, a new role in the Community Safety Department leading collaboration across York campuses to build a community-centric, trauma-informed engagement strategy to respond to mental health crisis and homelessness on campus.
Throughout her work, she has seen the importance of delivering a diverse range of support needs and styles, and she loves discussing how we can be creative within our approaches to this work. She feels privileged to be invited into the communities she gets to work in and to have personal stories of strength and resiliency shared with her. She doesn’t take this privilege for granted.
From April-October, Andrea can most often be found in the 500-level of the SkyDome.