About Us

Guimel is Wayside’s first Vice President of People and Culture and Chief Diversity Officer. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. Prior to her current role, she was the Program Director for Wayside’s Framingham Family Networks and worked for the Department of Children and Family Services in Compton, California. Guimel’s current role allows her to utilize her experience as a social worker while maximizing her organizational and analytical strengths. Guimel sees the position of Vice President of People and Culture and Chief Diversity Officer as an opportunity to expand upon and broaden culture, fortify communication among staff, boost staff morale, empower staff to consider their career development and prioritize and streamline process efficiencies across Wayside. 

Guimel is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) and a Society of Human Resources Management Senior Certified Professional. In 2019 she was awarded the Elizabeth Funk Emerging Leaders Award from the Association of Behavioral Health for her work embedding equity and inclusion across the agency. In 2020 she was named to the 50 Most Influential Business People of Color list by Newton-Needham Metrowest Regional Chamber. She speaks fluent Portuguese and lives in Natick with her wife and son.

Amy is Wayside’s Director of Recruitment & Equity Culture. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. She has worked for 11 years at Wayside as clinician, director and advocate in residential programs. Amy currently co-leads Wayside’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Initiative. It seeks to ingrain DEI throughout the agency by creating trust, training staff to have courageous conversations about race and racism, increasing social capital, and applying an equity lens to all environments using data metrics to hold leadership accountable. For the past 20 years Amy has explored the effects of power, oppression and anti-racism on systems and examined how creating a culture of health equity impacts our society. Her work has always focused on populations that are underserved including those with substance use disorders, foster children who have experienced trauma and LGBTQ+ youth.

A Marriage and Family Therapist who lives in Rhode Island, Amy enjoys drinking endless cups of coffee, spending time with her artist wife, three black and brown children who are adopted from foster care, numerous pups and one harassed cat. They endeavor to be the queerest, most anti-racist family on the block.

Daniela’s Our Director of People & Career for Wayside Youth & Family Support Network and provides outpatient therapy to children and adolescents. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. Before deciding to go back to school to get her master’s degree, Daniela worked in the administrative realm of healthcare services, from private to nonprofit. After having her first two daughters, she became dedicated to the geriatric field and became a hospice volunteer while working at Walden Behavioral in the inpatient unit for psychiatric needs and eating disorders which created a need in her to work with children, adolescents and families.

Daniela started her career at Wayside as an in-home therapist and outpatient clinician where she dedicated her expertise in cultural and ethnic considerations to help Latino families explore ways they could understand and bring their own trauma to the forefront of treatment. At Wayside she has taken on initiatives around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is most interested in having courageous conversations about our society’s mental health, inequalities, racism, sexism, and diverse cultures. Daniela speaks fluent Spanish and lives in Framingham with her high school sweetheart husband and three biracial daughters, surrounded by food, books, and music all day long.

Tanisha is our Home-Based Clinician at Wayside. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. She has been at Wayside for almost nine years. As a leader of People of Color Association (POCA), she actively supports her colleagues of color in the Medford and Waltham offices. She participates in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees for both the Waltham/Medford office as well as for all Wayside. A Courageous Conversations Champion, Tanisha’s mission is to encourage everyone to appreciate and validate people’s perspectives and learn the different parts of their whole selves and express them.

Before Wayside, Tanisha worked in the corporate world in administration with a dream of becoming a therapist. A single mother, Tanisha felt she had to choose work and stability over chasing dreams. However, one day a call came in and it was clear the person had mental health issues and Tanisha took it as a sign. Within months, she quit her job on the day she was offered a promotion and went to graduate school. Throughout her life, she has had a passion for people and celebrating diversity. Founder of the first multicultural sorority at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she believes in the pillars of friendship, sisterhood, the advancement of women in higher education, community service, and increasing multicultural awareness.

Tanisha and her young adult son with Autism Spectrum Disorder (formerly Asperger’s) live in Malden, Mass. where she enjoys good food and music as she dances in her home to cope with the stress of the work/life balance.

Penny is Director of Campus Operations and Agency Risk. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. She has been at Wayside since 2003 first working as a residential counselor in what was then known as the Edgell Road Program. Dedicated to young people, Penny initially worked with Boys & Girls Clubs and volunteered as a youth basketball coach. For Penny the work has always been about engaging in healthy activities and projects with youth focusing on empowerment and pro-social community behaviors. Wayside was a natural transition to continue this work on a larger scale with young people who have a wide range of presentations and needs.

In her current role, Penny oversees Campus Day Programs, Admissions, Nursing, Department of Early Education and Care requirements, staff training as well as Agency Risk and Compliance. In addition, Penny has been a trainer in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention for the last 15 years. This training focuses on engaging in safe and respectful ways to interact and de-escalate young people with an emphasis on empowering them and recognizing their needs from a variety of different backgrounds and mental/behavioral health presentations. The impact of racial trauma, oppression and systemic racism is an integral part of these trainings. The Courageous Conversations that occur within and after them are invaluable to further advance the care of the youth and staff involved.

Penny has a registered therapy dog named Maximus that she brings to Wayside. She also volunteers at local mental health hospitals and libraries. When not out running she enjoys working outside landscaping or gardening and creating homemade goodies from the harvest.

Taiany is the Program Director of Wayside’s Medford Community Services, where she has worked for over five years providing community-based mental health services for youth and their families and overseeing program functions. Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. After graduate school Taiany began her career in mental health working with the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts where she provided clinical care to adolescent girls. She felt encouraged to focus more closely on long-term clinical services and furthered her career with Wayside, providing in-home therapy. Her community-based work allowed her to reconnect with her Brazilian background in a therapeutic manner and she was drawn to further interrogate and challenge oppressive systems.

Taiany currently oversees the ongoing functions of Medford Community Services, takes part in the agency’s Senior Team, and supports Wayside’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative. She speaks fluent Portuguese and provides bi-lingual clinical services to English and Portuguese speaking families. A lover of the “big-small-town” feel of Boston, Taiany enjoys watching the sunrise every day, searching for the city’s best nachos with her husband, and sipping on her favorite hot chai latte in her beloved fuzzy papasan chair.

For over nine years, I have operated as a Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Strategic Consultant tasked with spearheaded institutional systems and procedures for Wayside Youth & Family Network. In this time, I have collaborated with the Director of People & Culture and the President/CEO to generate DEI policies and practices for a workforce of more than 450 employees.

Some key initiatives, and successes include:

• Building and implementing the organization's founding principles, creating five key strategic objectives while establishing matrices for all targets.
• Co-creating guidelines and curriculum for DEI introductory classes necessary for all new hires during employee orientation.
• Focusing on personnel commitment to onboard and support individuals aligned with the agency's commitment to diversity, evidence by annual survey results revealing findings of reduced bias and prejudice toward others.
• Improvement of 5% in the recruitment of people of color for managerial and supervisor roles in all management categories.

Pursuant to my career goals, professional experience, and desire to help others, I launched Business Organization Resources to help businesses in various sectors seeking to prioritize DEI practices in the workplace. For over eight years, I have assisted companies pursuing a more diverse and inclusive environment by adopting an anti-racism methodology. As such, I lead risk management endeavors by executing programs focused on detecting and eliminating systematic racism.

Some key initiatives and priorities include:

• Supporting corporations in creating and executing accountability key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progression and results.
• Administering counseling services to teenagers, men, women, and couples, including trauma informed counseling to enhance their quality of life.
• Coaching and developing managers to achieve and sustain improvement in performance to maximize program and organizational achievement.