Kailie Sullivan, LCSW, OSW-c, is the Associate Director of Client Experience for Counseling Services at the Dempsey Center, a non-profit organization headquartered in Maine providing personalized cancer support services. She utilizes a trauma-informed approach, providing clinical leadership to a team of psychosocial oncology care providers who share the goal of helping clients to identify and build resiliency through their cancer experience. Kailie has worked in oncology and palliative care settings since 2008, including New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weil Cornell Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned a master's degree in Social Work from New York University with a special concentration in Clinical Program Development. Kailie has held Board certification in Oncology Social Work since 2014 and has served as a state representative for the Association of Oncology Social Work since 2019. 

Carissa Hodgson, LCSW, OSW-C, is the Director of Programs and Community Outreach at Bright Spot Network, which provides a program of support to parents with cancer who have young children. She has 15 years of clinical and program experience working with families facing cancer. Her professional passion is supporting kids and families who are navigating cancer, shaped largely by her father having lung cancer when she was a child and her step-father’s diagnosis of liver cancer when she was a young adult.  

Carissa has been a member of the Association of Oncology Social Work since 2015 and presently sits as co-chair of the Youth, Families and Cancer Special Interest Group. She enjoys traveling around the country giving presentations and writing articles for cancer magazines and blogs. She recently finished co-authoring a chapter on cancer in middle adulthood for the upcoming Oncology and Palliative Social Work: Psychosocial Care for People Coping with Cancer textbook published by Oxford Press.  

Carissa is also a Long-Term Lecturer at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches courses on grief and loss, as well as a generalist practice course with individuals, families and groups. 

Carissa has a private psychotherapy and consultation practice where she specializes in cancer, chronic illness, caregiving, grief and loss, child and adolescent development, family systems, and issues relating to the LGBTQIA+ community. She enjoys supporting front-line staff at non-profit organizations through in-services, trainings and short-term support groups.    

Carissa lives outside of Madison, Wisonsin, with her social worker wife, 8-year-old son and two silly pups. She looks forward to time spent with family meandering through the prairies near her home, taking up a new craft, playing board games, and taste-testing her wife’s hand crafted chocolates.