McKenzie Le Tendre

McKenzie LeTendre (she/her) is from Denver, Colorado. She received a Bachelor’s degree from Regis University in Neuroscience, a Master’s in Social Work, and a Master’s in Public Health from San Diego State University with a concentration in administration and health management and policy. She started her career at the University of Colorado at Boulder studying the neural pathways involved in cocaine relapse. Since then, she has been a program manager for a youth mentoring organization, supported a social enterprise start-up, and opened a small grant writing business where she assists small non-profits in program planning, evaluation, and obtaining grant funding. Currently, she works as a Program Manager at the Boulder County Healthy Youth Alliance coordinating community-wide substance use prevention programming. In this position she has also supported the initial stages of launching a co-responder program and developing a coordinated resource and referral platform to ensure equitable access to behavioral health services. In her research, McKenzie has focused on understanding nuances in the relationship between adverse childhood experience and substance use, as well as other risk and protective factors that affect health related outcomes. At GSSW, she studies how risk and protective factors influence behavioral health with an applied implementation lens, under the supervision of Dr. Heather Taussig

• MSW/MPH, San Diego State University