In the next few months, there will be three new faces in the Office of Field Education. Valli Kalei Kanuha (pictured left) will join the staff Jan. 3, as the new Assistant Dean for Field Education, and two School MSW graduates were hired as field faculty lecturers: Saul Tran Cornwall and Khalfani Mwamba.
For the past 40 years, Valli Kalei Kanuha has been an activist, therapist, consultant and researcher focusing on intimate partner and sexual violence, and the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Currently professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, she has worked as a community-based researcher and consultant in Hawaii and the continental U.S., and lectures widely on violence against women and social justice issues. She has developed and tested a Hawaiian culturally based, domestic violence program; created interventions for children who have experienced domestic violence in the home; studied intimate violence in women’s same-sex relationships; and conducted a statewide survey of child abuse and neglect in Hawaii.
The recipient of the NASW Presidential Award for Excellence in Research and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Hawaii, Kanuha is a founding member of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and board member of the Joyful Heart Foundation and the National Indigenous Women’s research working group. She received a BA in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MSW from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Washington.
In 1997, Saul Tran Cornwall began his career in the social/human services sector as an AmeriCorps member. He has spent the past seven years as a mental health counselor and program coordinator at Seattle’s Asian Counseling and Referral Services in the Children, Youth and Families Department. He’s worked in youth programming at International District Housing Alliance, the Service Board, Holt International Children’s Services, and also specialized in child welfare and foster care at the DSHS Adoption Unit and Ryther Child Center. Saul was born in Vietnam, adopted at the age of two, and raised in North Plains, Ore., before moving to Seattle. He received his MSW from the UW School of Social Work in 2007.
Khalfani Mwamba has worked as a therapist since 2000. In 2009, after earning his MSW degree from the School, he began evidence-based correctional counseling, rising quickly to clinical supervisor. In a national model program, Khalfani coordinated deployment of various practice treatment programs geared to therapeutic group interactions, serving 120 reentry participants daily. In additional to his social work career, Khalfani has studied African rhythm systems worldwide and is the founder of Mshenga a Babu (Message from the Ancestors) Rhythm Ensemble. He is interested in how South and West African music serves as a vehicle for both self care and community care.