Episode Seven: Interview w/Emily Barnhardt, LCSW

Welcome back to Powerful Vulnerability! Today, we are joined by Emily Barnhardt. Emily is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a consultant with the Bridging Families™ Institute at Crossnore Communities for Children, a child welfare nonprofit in North Carolina supporting children and families across the foster care continuum. In her role, she helps lead the expansion of an innovative professional foster parenting model rooted in trauma-informed, family-centered practice and focused on reimagining how families experience the foster care system. Emily holds a BA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Master of Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout her social work career, Emily has worked across clinical and community settings, including roles supporting survivors of human trafficking, sexual and domestic violence, and coordinating multidisciplinary response teams to build collaborative, trauma-informed systems of care. She frequently speaks on topics she cares deeply about, from training National Guard service members on supporting sexual assault survivors to leading college and high school workshops on boundaries, healthy relationships, and violence prevention. In this episode, Emily joins the conversation in a personal capacity to share her own lived experience with grief and loss – not just the loss of loved ones, but the many ways grief shows up across our lives and lives in our bodies over time. Rather than speaking from a professional role, Emily speaks as someone who has intimately known grief, continues to navigate its complexities, and is learning what it means to live honestly and gently alongside it. Emily references a few resources in her remarks. If you are interested in learning more about The Dinner Party, please visit www.thedinnerparty.org. If you are interested in the somatic work that she describes, you can find Dr. Hillary McBride's book, The Wisdom of Your Body anywhere books are sold