Mikaela Kozlowski is an intern. She wants to be clear about that — she is still learning. But the team at Healing Pathways Foundation will tell you that she shows up like someone who has already decided what kind of clinician and social work leader she's going to be, and is simply using every hour of her internship to prove it.

Mikaela is a Master of Social Work candidate at Winthrop University and holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She came to Healing Pathways with a foundation in policy practice and research — the kind of academic training that teaches you to see the systems behind the symptoms, not just the person sitting in the chair but the structures that put them there. That perspective shapes how she approaches clinical work. She doesn't just ask what someone is going through. She asks what's been in the way.

At the Foundation, Mikaela is gaining hands-on clinical experience through trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches, working directly with clients under supervision and contributing to the team in ways that go well beyond what's expected of an intern. But her role doesn't stop at the therapy room. She is being developed as a future leader in program implementation, program development, and policy — the work that determines not just how individual clients are served, but how entire programs are designed, evaluated, and scaled to reach more people. She brings research, new ideas, and the kind of strategic thinking that bridges what happens in a session with what happens in a system.

Her interest in youth and family empowerment is not something she discovered in a textbook — it's the reason she chose social work in the first place, and it shows up in how seriously she takes every interaction, whether it's a client session, a planning meeting, or a policy conversation that will shape services long after her internship ends.

What makes Mikaela different from most graduate interns is that she is not here to observe. She is here to build. She is the kind of emerging clinician and leader that Healing Pathways was designed to develop — someone who can hold a client's story with care in one room and then walk into the next room and design the program that makes sure more people like that client can be reached. She is early in her career, and she is already the kind of social work professional that organizations build around.