Health and Human Services

You work with a diverse population and strive to support and understand the needs of people from the LGBTQ+ community every day. How do you know that you’re truly providing an inclusive and safe environment? Through practical guidance from experienced professionals, you will gain resources, techniques, and tools on how to connect with LGBTQ+ community members, communicate without offending, and eliminate barriers that help to promote a healthy community for everyone. Sign up today to become a better ally for this often overlooked and misunderstood community.

Kelly Andrichik has been a Police Officer at the University of Wisconsin Parkside in Kenosha for 22 years. On campus she is responsible for Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, and Human Trafficking investigations as well as the training programs surrounding these topics for staff, faculty, and students on campus and frequently guest lectures in classes on campus.  Kelly has been a Safe Zone trainer for the campus since 2010 and was awarded the P. B. Poorman award in 2018 for her work advocating for the LGBTQ+ population on and off campus.

Kelly is also the Chair of the Kenosha County Sexual Assault Response Team, she travels around the state with DOJ as part of their speaker’s bureau to train other Law Enforcement on sexual assault best practices and she is on the speaker’s bureau for Fight to End Exploitation in Racine.  Kelly believes that education surrounding the above topics is imperative as we strive to serve every person in our communities.

Dr. Dana Ballewske is a licensed clinical psychologist, who specializes in the areas of trauma, attachment, and LGBTQ+, specifically for children and adolescents.  Dr. Ballewske has worked in the field for nearly 25 years, including over ten years in child protective services.  

Dr. Ballewske currently manages a large team of outpatient therapists who provide mental health services in multiple school districts in Southeastern Wisconsin and can often be found in various school settings providing professional development and support to educators.

For decades, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet, at the very moment humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, neglected, and denied. Likewise in health care and medical research, when old people have bad outcomes, a common response is to say, “Well of course, they were old and sick,” — inferring that "old" inevitably leads to "sick."

Drawing from both conventional and complementary medicine, integrative aging helps older adults live well throughout the decades and stages of old age. It begins with the assumption that elderhood should be approached medically in the same ways we approach childhood and adulthood, recognizing that bodies, lives and priorities change as we move through the sub-stages of each major part of life. It also focuses on health and well-being in addition to disease and illness, pays attention to prevention, nutrition, activity, goals, and purpose, and recognizes both the benefits and challenges of growing older.

In this presentation, we explore the way we look at aging, the way we think and feel about medicine, and what it means to be a human being across the lifespan.

  

Louise Aronson, MD MFA, is a leading geriatrician, writer, educator, professor of medicine at UCSF and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Aronson has received the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year award, and the American Geriatrics Society Clinician-Teacher of the Year award. At UCSF, Louise has served as director of the Pathways to Discovery program, the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center, the Optimizing Aging Project, and as Chief of Geriatrics Education. Her writing credits include the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Discover, Vox, JAMA, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and she has been featured on TODAY, CBS This Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, Morning Edition, Politico, Kaiser Health News, Tech Nation and the New Yorker. Currently, Dr. Aronson divides her time among patient care, community-based aging innovations, teaching, health advocacy in the media, and writing.