Clinical Director

THIS POSITION IS AVAILABLE IN MAY OF 2026; ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS NOW

Dependency Advocacy Center (DAC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, provides interdisciplinary family defense legal services to indigent parents and children involved with Santa Clara County’s child welfare system. Substance use disorder, intimate partner violence, and mental health concerns are commonly presenting issues, often rooted in the layered effects of poverty, marginalization, and intergenerational trauma. DAC was founded on the belief that traditional legal advocacy is insufficient to adequately represent our parent and youth clients.

Our approach to holistic family defense utilizes an interdisciplinary team of attorneys, social workers, and mentor parents to create client-centered legal strategies designed to support family reunification and the family’s long-term success.

Dependency Advocacy Center provides zealous legal representation to indigent clients in the juvenile dependency system to promote timely reunification and preservation of families in a safe, healthy environment. DAC believes that every parent and child entering the dependency system has a right to be treated with dignity, compassion and respect.

The Clinical Director works directly with staff across roles at DAC, including our social workers and Mentor Parents, leading clinical processing groups for our attorneys and informing our clinical practice as an organization. Social workers at DAC partner with a dynamic group of attorneys who represent parents and children involved in the child welfare system. DAC social workers provide clinical expertise to support attorneys in: (1) presenting clients’ legal positions to the court in open child welfare cases and (2) advocating for clients who are involved with the Department of Family and Children’s Services informally, before a court case opens.

Roles and responsibilities of the social workers at DAC include completing individualized needs assessments, providing referrals to resources in the community, ongoing case management, assistance in system navigation, interfacing with various service providers, providing clinical assessments, observing parent/child visitations, supporting clients at court hearings, providing expert testimony in litigation, writing reports to the court on the client’s behalf, and attending non-court based meetings, including CFT (Child Family Team) meetings.

Some work may be done remotely but in person work is required for this position.

• developing and managing DAC’s social worker program, including facilitating monthly group supervision for all DAC social workers, providing clinical supervision to DAC social workers, providing feedback to DAC leadership on best practices in the field of social work, collaborating with child welfare system partners to promote DAC’s social work program, overseeing DAC’s social work intern program, managing data collection, preparing written reports to funders and acting as assigned social worker on a limited number of cases;
• providing case consultation to DAC staff on clinical matters including risk assessment/planning, mental health support, trauma informed care, etc., and be accessible to DAC staff including working from court each week for in person support,
• providing individual and group clinical supervision to DAC’s mentor parents and collaborating with the Mentor Parent Program Manager for programmatic clinical support and training tools as needed;
• supporting DAC’s organizational development with regards to clinical work with clients including clinical training for attorneys, administrative assistants and management, developing DAC’s mental health risk assessment protocols for client-facing staff and staying up to date on relevant clinical topics such as trauma informed care, addiction and recovery, family systems research and more.

• Masters in Social Work, preferably a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with two years post licensure experience (including the ability to meet all Board of Behavioral Sciences requirements to act as a Clinical…