Lucy Marie Notaro, LMSW, is a bilingual (Spanish-English) and bicultural social worker and applied behavior therapist with 39 years of direct practice experience working with inner-city and immigrant children, adults, families, and communities. She resides in Rockland and Suffolk County, NY, and serves adults, children, families, parents, schools, and groups in Queens, Long Island, New Jersey, and throughout the New York Hudson Valley. She holds social work licenses in New York and New Jersey.
Ms. Notaro's extensive professional experience encompasses providing trauma-informed professional development workshops, consultation, and services to schools, medical practitioners, and other professional and community groups on the mental health impact of immigration on unaccompanied minors, youth at risk of caregiver deportation, and their families. Her commitment emerged from conducting interviews, mental health assessments, and psychotherapy with adults and youths pursuing United States residency, coupled with recognizing the need for enhanced education and support to address the complex needs of immigrant youths, their caregivers, educators, and communities.
Ms. Notaro is well-versed in collaboration and consultation within educational environments, having served as a District-Wide Child Abuse Mandated Reporter Consultant at CSD #11 in the Bronx, NY, a School-Victim Assistance Project Coordinator at JHS 43, CSD #5 in Harlem, NY, and a behavior modification consultant and supervisor across various educational settings in Long Island, Queens, the South Bronx, and Rockland County. Her experience underscores the advantages of a multidisciplinary approach in working with youths and their families, especially through providing home, school, and center-based Early Intervention, Committee on Preschool Education (CPSE), and Committee on Special Education (CSE) applied behavior analysis (ABA), Behavior Modification, Parent Training, and Social Work services to immigrant families of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Ms. Notaro currently owns and operates a social work practice with satellite offices throughout Westchester, Rockland, Northern NJ, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties where she provides individual and group psychotherapy, community mental health workshops, mandated offender treatment, mental status examinations, domestic violence evaluations, parenting skills support, and mental health evaluations for clients with immigration, criminal, family law, and child protective service cases.
Her practice interests include culturally competent direct clinical practice with immigrant families, forensic social work, mental health and behavior assessment, interpersonal trauma, therapeutic parenting, and behavior modification via Applied Behavior Analysis. Ms. Notaro has provided services within school, home, agency, legal, community and temporary housing settings, and has also provided foster care staff and foster parents skills development clinical consultation and workshops. She served as a member of the Queens Borough President’s Task Force Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence and was an annual conference speaker. She is a public speaker on domestic violence and mental health concerns within immigrant communities and provides twelve-week virtual Spanish-language support groups on mental health, domestic violence, and parenting children with trauma.
Ms. Notaro is the Chair of the Immigrant Resources Committee with the Suffolk County Hispanic Advisory Board. She is committed to providing services to non-United States Resident immigrants and their children, particularly as focused on the impact of trauma on immigrant lives and communities. She is a member of multiple organizations to include the Suffolk County Hispanic Advisory Board, the Rockland Immigration Coalition, the Rockland County Adult Mental Health Sub-Committee, and the New York State Association for Bilingual Education. Ms. Notaro graduated from Herbert H. Lehman College, CUNY in 1989 with a BA in Child Development, and from Adelphi University in 2004 with a master’s degree in social work – Generalist Practice.