Purpose Prize

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Carmen Carrillo

California Women's Commission on Addictions
Purpose Prize Fellow 2007

Advocating for women-centered addiction recovery services

Carmen Carrillo was the first Latina to be accepted as a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Clinical Psychology program. In 2001, just after retiring from a career as a psychologist focused on low-income clients with diverse cultural needs, Carrillo joined the Board of Directors of the California Women’s commission on Addictions – and saw the opportunity to do more. Over the past six years, she has developed a curriculum to educate Latina immigrants about drugs, alcohol and nicotine, and trained hundreds of Latinas in communication skills and dispute resolution. She initiated a campaign to target advertising efforts that glamorize alcohol consumption among African-American women, including community organizing strategies to enlist local merchants. And she provided trainings for the staff members of clinics, recovery homes, and schools, so they could support recovering female addicts in the workplace. Carrillo plans to expand her outreach to Southeast Asian immigrant women and to publish training manuals for Latina and female African American leaders.