William Cloud

Dr. Cloud began his academic career in 1981 as Instructor in the Social Work Department at Lemoyne-Owen College and resigned as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department in 1989. He joined the faculty at GSSW as Assistant Professor in January of 1990 and retired at the rank of Professor in June of 2021. At that point, he was also awarded Professor Emeritus status by the University of Denver’s Board of Trustees.

During his nearly 32 years of service at GSSW, he taught a wide range of courses in the MSW Program as well as Statistics in PhD Program. He also served as Chair or Coordinator of a variety of key standing committees and curriculum specializations; including, Search and Screening, Promotion and Tenure, Research Sequence, Drug Dependency Concentration, along with a range of other leadership positions. In 1990, he was one of the co-founders of the Bridge Project, the University’s flagship community outreach program until it closed in 2020. Between 2002 and 2019, he served as Chair of CSWE’s Minority Advisory Committee in Alexandria VA. He also served as a reviewer for substance abuse and mental health research grant applications for the Department of Defense in Bethesda, MD.

His areas of research and scholarship include substance misuse recovery and public housing initiatives. He has coauthored three books, numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, along with more than a dozen government research reports. His and his coauthor’s (Dr. Robert Granfield) most impactful scholarship resulted in the conceptualization of “recovery capital,” a strengths-focused concept that has had a profound impact on substance misuse treatment and policy; both in the U.S. and internationally. Since 2017, there have been nine annual recovery capital conferences across Canada and numerous others across the U.S. Recently, certification as a Recovery Capital Professional has been made available by the Canadian Addiction Counselor Certification Federation. Finally, the concept of recovery capital has begun to be applied in areas beyond substance misuse; some of these include gambling addiction, mental health, as well as medicine.

• MSW
• PhD