Meet D. Crystal Coles, Ph.D. candidate
Coles is a Ph.D. candidate and adjunct instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well a third-year fellow in the CSWE Minority Fellowship Program. Her scholarship interest practice experiences lie in the public child welfare arena, with an emphasis on trauma-informed social work practice, overall systemic functioning and systemic contribution to childhood trauma. She is committed to addressing the needs of society through her work and its emphasis on social justice, systematic inequalities, policy development and assisting social change within the foster care system for children and families.
Coles teaches in both the B.S.W. and M.S.W. programs at VCU and is also an adjunct professor at Longwood University. Her teaching interests include clinical social work practice, human behavior in the environment, community and organizational theory, and social justice.
Coles also serves as a research coordinator for the Virginia Department of Health at the VCU School of Social Work where she coordinates research with four Virginia communities, as well as collaborates with faculty researchers on existing and future studies. Her dissertation, “The Systemic Differences of Privatized and Non-Privatized Public Child Welfare Systems: A Comparative Study,” examines the systemic differences of privatized and non-privatized public child welfare systems. Its purpose is to provide important information that could serve to truly alter systemic functioning for the betterment of service delivery for the child through the integration of policy, practice and organizational functioning that prevents further victimization of children and youth within the foster care system.
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