Adam Mccormick

My guest today has spent more than 25 years with the boys our systems tend to give up on, boys in foster care, from which many of us adopted our children, juvenile justice, schools, and community programs.

So Adam McCormick is here.

He is a professor of social work and a nationally recognized speaker who explores how childhood experiences shape men to boys.

He facilitates trauma and masculinity groups with adolescent boys in his upcoming book, which I don't know the title of.

Yeah, I would love to.

Yeah.

So listeners, you can find Adam McCormick at his website and that'll be in the show notes.

Here's what I want you to take from today, folks.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Conversations from the A&F Podcast.

This is a slightly different episode, and I speak to Professor of Social Work, Adam McCormick, from St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas.

We chat about social work, social workers, aspects of the foster care system, and the nature of the system in the state.

We also consider the motivations of social workers to join the profession, and see how their life experiences impact on them and their social work.

Finally, we also chat about the challenges faced by LGBTQ young people in foster care, and the systemic hostility they face.

As always, if you have experience of adoption, fostering, or special guardianship from any perspective, personal or professional, and would like to share that on the podcast, please get in touch through the Facebook page, Blue Sky, or you can email us at aandfpodcast@gmail.com.

So I'm Adam McCormick.

I am a professor of social work at St. Edwards University, which is in Austin, Texas, uh, in the US.

You can go to our webpage for links to our podcast.

There's links to Adam's, um, Adam McCormick's resources on there.

There's links to some, um, books about foster care-

Mm-hmm

They're amazing books.

All right.

I just want to say thank you very much to Adam, Adam McCormick, for joining us again.

Thank you, Adam, for being here.

And as social workers, most of us are quite familiar with the term hurt people hurt people.

And today, our guest, Adam McCormick, has a new frame for us, which is really quite compelling, which is that hurt people also help people.

He's referencing how so many of us come to this field in large part or small part related to our past adversity or even trauma.

He's written a wonderful new book called Healing the Helping Professional, and we're gonna be talking about that today.

He is using evidence-based research, case studies, and his own experience in the classroom and out to challenge social work professionals that- so that we show up as our healthiest and most authentic selves.

Adam McCormick is a professor of social work at St. Edwards in Austin, Texas.

He's the recipient of many awards.

He has given many keynote presentations, and he is a deeply respected and even beloved professor.

Let's get into it.

My guest today is Dr. Adam McCormick, and he's got a huge laundry list of creds.

So let's just talk about it for a second.

He's a professor of social work, at St. Andrews University in Austin, Texas.

He holds a PhD from UT Arlington, as well as degrees from UT Austin.

He's the author of a book called LGBTQ Youth and Foster Care, Empowering Approaches to Inclusive Care and Healing the Helping Professional, The Unfinished Business of Childhood, with a forthcoming book on masculinity and boyhood trauma.

Adam's also the recipient of the 2026 Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award.

It's Texas' highest teaching honor, and he's delivered over 250 lectures and keynotes nationally on childhood trauma, burnout, masculinity, authenticity, and the inner lives of helping professionals.