Sara Roberts is the Senior Program Director for the NIH Ohio HEALing Communities Study. Her areas of professional focus have been on substance use disorder and mental health treatment, system-involved families and youth, trauma-informed care, and community engagement. She received a Bachelor’s of Art in Psychology with Departmental Honors from Kent State University and a Master of Science in Social Administration from Case Western Reserve University. Sara currently is a Licensed Independent Social Worker in the State of Ohio.
Her career started in working with a child welfare involved population, where Sara was part of a team out of University Settlement and develop community supports for families in the Broadway and Slavic Village neighborhoods in Cleveland using the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family to Family model in partnership with Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services (CCDCFS). She went on to work for CCDCFS for 8.5 years, as a social services worker and supervisor. After receiving her social work license, Sara moved into mental health treatment and provided Early Childhood Mental Health Services at Ohio Guidestone in Cleveland, with specific training in evidence-based trauma interventions. She worked for Family and Community Services as the Associate Clinical Director where she was instrumental in helping to create and develop treatment programming for system-involved families, as was a treatment and housing options for adult substance-using populations. Sara has served as the State Director of Clinical Services for The Bair Foundation, where she was the administrator for a 40-person statewide team that offered treatment to high-risk families and children. Most recently, Sara was the Chief Program Officer and Clinical Director and started Hope Village Recovery Center, an outpatient treatment center that serves substance-using adults where she developed the programming, treatment model and assisted the agency in achieving certification through Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.