Extended Professional Bio
Mary-Margaret Sweeney, MSW, RYT is a dynamic trainer/educator/facilitator, consultant, and writer with over a decade of experience. Her training and curriculum writing experience includes the technology start-up space, established corporate entities, non-profit organizations, universities, and community building events. Mary-Margaret first discovered training work in the restaurant industry as part of Potbelly Sandwich Works “Dream Team,” traveling to open new Potbelly restaurants, training current stores and team members on new product launches, and her home restaurant location served as a manager training site for the company. In addition to her day job, Mary-Margaret began serving Chicago's Broadway Youth Center (a project of Howard Brown Health Services) as an HIV and STI test counselor and educator. It was there she learned that there were ways to merge her professional expertise and advocacy work. After graduating with her Bachelor of Arts in Social Justice Studies from Roosevelt University, Mary-Margaret wanted to learn more about the technology start-up world in her city of Chicago. She became employee #6 of GrubHub's customer service team, which numbered in the hundreds when she departed. Mary-Margaret was tasked with formalizing the training program as the company grew, on-boarding new hires and training existing customer service staff on new technology products. During her time there, she coached the ever-expanding customer service team through office moves, the company's acquisitions of CampusFood and FanGo, the merger with Seamless Web, and GrubHub's lead-up to their initial public offering (IPO).
After these career milestones, Mary-Margaret began to again imagine what marrying her hard skills of training and professional development with advocacy work might yield. She left GrubHub to enter the Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work, where she strategically focused on social work and health care, as The Affordable Care Act was in the Obama administration's pipeline. This choice served her well, and she had the opportunity to serve as the policy and programming intern for National Association of Social Workers Illinois chapter office, representing the interests of social workers at the local and state levels of government, and later served on the Committee on Diversity and Cultural Competence, assuring that the continuing education requirements for Illinois social workers reflected the profession's commitment to social justice and best practices. Her clinical internship was served with RefugeeOne, coordinating necessary medical appointments and critical care for refugee youth, and the development and facilitation of their first sexual health training. Partner agency GirlForward contracted her to develop this program more deeply, and designing culturally competent, trauma-sensitive sexual health curricula is still one of Mary-Margaret's passions.
Upon her move to Indianapolis, IN Mary-Margaret remained involved in refugee resettlement and life skills training, and served as an adolescent health educator for LifeSmart Youth (formerly Social Health Association of Indiana) where she assisted in the pilot launch of their teen dating violence prevention program, Communicating with And Respecting Each other (CARE). She facilitated the well-known evidence-based curriculum Making a Difference, as well as medically accurate puberty education. This experience took Mary-Margaret to Scott County, IN during the height of the HIV outbreak in that community, which garnered international attention in the public health community. She delivered trauma-sensitive pregnancy and STI prevention education to Scott County's middle school classrooms, with added focus on HIV/AIDS.
Mary-Margaret left LifeSmart Youth to manage the training program at Domestic Violence Network. During her time there, she updated trainings on intimate partner violence to be more inclusive of marginalized communities, updated best practices, and engaged new community partners in both the non-profit and corporate spaces. She led the organization to present at a conference for the first time, and by the end of her first year there, had shared DVN's work at 6 conferences at the state, regional, and national levels. She left the organization as Director of Community Engagement, overseeing the organizations community wide plan to end domestic violence, Intersections, engaging key stakeholders across Central Indiana.
In the spring of 2018, Mary-Margaret added Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) to her list of credentials, and began to imagine how she could bring together her different career experiences in a way that would allow her to explore her varied talents and interests. In March of 2018, she launched her training and consulting business seek&summon. seek&summon engages non-profit, corporations, and private clients in training, yoga practice, and consulting work. Areas of expert training include sexual health and healthy relationship education, trauma-informed care practices, self-care and vicarious trauma work with social service workers, childhood grief and trauma, and ethical social work practice. Her consulting work guides non-profits and corporations alike in establishing, evaluating, and refreshing their training departments, and organizations engage her to write curriculum and evaluate existing curriculum for best practices and trauma-sensitive approaches. The third offering of seek&summon is yoga; for private clients, public studio and community spaces, and for staff retreats and trainings. She also delivers training to other yoga teachers on trauma-informed yoga practice.
Mary-Margaret is based in Indianapolis, IN and available for travel.
After these career milestones, Mary-Margaret began to again imagine what marrying her hard skills of training and professional development with advocacy work might yield. She left GrubHub to enter the Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work, where she strategically focused on social work and health care, as The Affordable Care Act was in the Obama administration's pipeline. This choice served her well, and she had the opportunity to serve as the policy and programming intern for National Association of Social Workers Illinois chapter office, representing the interests of social workers at the local and state levels of government, and later served on the Committee on Diversity and Cultural Competence, assuring that the continuing education requirements for Illinois social workers reflected the profession's commitment to social justice and best practices. Her clinical internship was served with RefugeeOne, coordinating necessary medical appointments and critical care for refugee youth, and the development and facilitation of their first sexual health training. Partner agency GirlForward contracted her to develop this program more deeply, and designing culturally competent, trauma-sensitive sexual health curricula is still one of Mary-Margaret's passions.
Upon her move to Indianapolis, IN Mary-Margaret remained involved in refugee resettlement and life skills training, and served as an adolescent health educator for LifeSmart Youth (formerly Social Health Association of Indiana) where she assisted in the pilot launch of their teen dating violence prevention program, Communicating with And Respecting Each other (CARE). She facilitated the well-known evidence-based curriculum Making a Difference, as well as medically accurate puberty education. This experience took Mary-Margaret to Scott County, IN during the height of the HIV outbreak in that community, which garnered international attention in the public health community. She delivered trauma-sensitive pregnancy and STI prevention education to Scott County's middle school classrooms, with added focus on HIV/AIDS.
Mary-Margaret left LifeSmart Youth to manage the training program at Domestic Violence Network. During her time there, she updated trainings on intimate partner violence to be more inclusive of marginalized communities, updated best practices, and engaged new community partners in both the non-profit and corporate spaces. She led the organization to present at a conference for the first time, and by the end of her first year there, had shared DVN's work at 6 conferences at the state, regional, and national levels. She left the organization as Director of Community Engagement, overseeing the organizations community wide plan to end domestic violence, Intersections, engaging key stakeholders across Central Indiana.
In the spring of 2018, Mary-Margaret added Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) to her list of credentials, and began to imagine how she could bring together her different career experiences in a way that would allow her to explore her varied talents and interests. In March of 2018, she launched her training and consulting business seek&summon. seek&summon engages non-profit, corporations, and private clients in training, yoga practice, and consulting work. Areas of expert training include sexual health and healthy relationship education, trauma-informed care practices, self-care and vicarious trauma work with social service workers, childhood grief and trauma, and ethical social work practice. Her consulting work guides non-profits and corporations alike in establishing, evaluating, and refreshing their training departments, and organizations engage her to write curriculum and evaluate existing curriculum for best practices and trauma-sensitive approaches. The third offering of seek&summon is yoga; for private clients, public studio and community spaces, and for staff retreats and trainings. She also delivers training to other yoga teachers on trauma-informed yoga practice.
Mary-Margaret is based in Indianapolis, IN and available for travel.
Need Mary-Margaret's short bio for promotional material? Look below.
Mary-Margaret Sweeney, MSW, LSW, RYT is the founder of seek&summon, a training and consulting practice partnering with organizations and the individuals who make them up to inspire creative growth, radical care-taking, and informed practice. A subject matter expert in sexual health education, vicarious and secondary trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and team-building, her original curricula has been delivered across the United States as well as international conferences.