Name: Laura Holly
Title: Project associate
Hometown: Mondamin, Iowa
Talk about your job and what you like best about it:
I am a project associate for the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska (BHECN). BHECN’s mission is to improve access to behavioral health services across the state of Nebraska. As a project associate, I support several of BHECN’s state and federal grants that place student trainees in various internship programs and assist with coordination of webinars, events and training programs.
The main function of my job is to recruit behavioral health trainees across the state of Nebraska into programs that provide financial support to them during their field rotations or coursework. To date, I have worked with more than 160 students from a variety of programs including counseling, social work, drug and alcohol, community health, marriage and family therapy, psychiatric nursing, psychology, and physician assistant.
I help connect students to the appropriate funding source, make sure they complete all required activities and answer questions that arise during their time with us. The students come from training programs from Omaha to Scottsbluff. It has been a pleasure getting to work with the faculty and students from behavioral health training programs across the state. I also assist with data gathering and annual grant reporting.
I work with Articulate software to create online, interactive training modules for BHECN and BHECN’s partners. The training focuses on a variety of behavioral health topics including telehealth, integrated behavioral health, and child and adolescent anxiety disorders.
I also coordinate two live programs that provide continuing education to behavioral health providers. One of these is Project ECHO, a web-based video conferencing series related to pain and substance use disorders. Project ECHO calls happen twice a month and include a presentation by a member of the Pain and Substance Use Expert Panel, followed by a discussion of de-identified cases.
The second program is BHECN’s Core Topics in Behavioral Health Providers webinar series. Once a month during the school year, we invite faculty from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Psychology and the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Grace Abbott School of Social Work to present on relevant behavioral health topics.
I really enjoy the flexibility of my job and how it has continuously allowed me to grow since I started with BHECN in 2015. I am honored to contribute to the work of BHECN, which is so important to me, the state, and the nation.
List three things people may not know about you:
- I have a black belt in taekwondo.
- I enjoy karaoke.
- I have traveled to seven countries.