The Team

Prior to her current role, Guimel 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 2022 she was awarded the Edna Smith Health Equity Award by Metrowest Health Foundation. In 2020 and 2023 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.

As Wayside’s Director of Training & Equity Culture for 20 years, Amy has explored the intricate dynamics of power, oppression, and anti-racism. Her work has focused on underserved populations, with a special focus on youth who use substances, individuals impacted by trauma, and LGBTQ+ youth.

As a seasoned Family Therapist residing in Rhode Island, Amy enjoys drinking endless cups of coffee, spending time with her artist wife, her teen kids, and menagerie of beloved pets. They endeavor to be the most fun multiracial, queerest, anti-racist family on the block.

Daniela provides outpatient therapy to children and adolescents. Before deciding to go back to school to get her master’s degree, she worked in the administrative realm of healthcare services, from private to nonprofit. After having her first two daughters, Daniela 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 Wilson, LMHC (she/her), a Boston native, discovered her calling to be a therapist at a young age. She pursued psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where her involvement in the Nuance program in the multicultural dorm opened her eyes to the beauty of diverse coexistence. This experience, along with a serendipitous meeting with a fellow woman-of-color psychology major, led to the founding of the pioneering Delta Xi Phi Multicultural Sorority Inc. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The sorority endures today, promoting friendship, sisterhood, multicultural awareness, community service, and the advancement of women in higher education.
Tanisha is a multifaceted professional with over a decade of experience at Wayside Youth and Family Support Network. Her passion lies in supervision and in-home therapy, and she actively contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees at both the Waltham site and “All Wayside.” As a Courageous Conversations Champion and Rainbow Champion, Tanisha’s personal mission is to foster empathy, validate diverse perspectives, and encourage the authentic expression of one’s whole self.

In 2017, Tanisha co-founded and later led the People of Color Association (POCA) at the Waltham site, expanding its influence throughout Wayside. Her efforts provided crucial support and validation for people of color working in the mental health field, especially during the challenges of the 2020 pandemic. Currently, Tanisha continues her support through training initiatives for current and new agency hires and at the Wayside Equity Training Center.

Residing in Malden, MA, with her young adult son on the Autism Spectrum, Tanisha finds solace in crocheting, savoring good food, cherishing good company, and dancing to music in the comfort of her home—a means to navigate the delicate balance between work and life’s demands.

Penny 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 has worked for over five years providing community-based mental health services for youth and their families and overseeing program functions. 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, Carlton has operated as a Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Strategic Consultant tasked with spearheaded institutional systems and procedures for Wayside Youth & Family Network. During this time, he has 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, evidenced by annual survey results revealing findings of reduced bias and prejudice toward others.
• Improvement of 5% in recruiting people of color for managerial and supervisor roles in all management categories.

Pursuant to his career goals, professional experience, and desire to help others, Carlton launched Business Organization Resources to help businesses in various sectors seeking to prioritize DEI practices in the workplace. For over eight years, he has assisted companies in pursuing a more diverse and inclusive environment by adopting an anti-racism methodology. As such, he leads 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.

Omkari L. Williams has worked as a political consultant and life coach for 30 years, with an emphasis on supporting activists who identify as introverted or highly sensitive. As a queer Black woman, she shares her own story of challenging injustice to empower others in making a difference in their communities. In addition to speaking to organizations around the country, she leads workshops and trainings and is host of the popular podcast, Stepping into Truth, where she interviews people doing activism in their own unique ways. To help people identify their own way of activism, she created the Activist Archetype Quiz ©. Williams was born and raised in Manhattan and now lives in western Massachusetts. She can be found at http://www.omkariwilliams.com.

Dr. Joyce McNickles, M.Ed and Ed.D (she/hers/her ) is a seasoned social justice educator and consultant with over three decades of experience in promoting cultural competency, racial equity, and inclusion across academic, corporate, and non-profit sectors. As the founder of McNickles & Associates, she specializes in coaching executive leadership, conducting staff training, and facilitating dialogues on diversity, including race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Currently serving as a Visiting Professor of Politics and Social Justice at Regis College, Dr. McNickles previously held a position as a Professor of Human Development and Human Services at Anna Maria College, where she taught courses on workplace diversity, social inequality, racial equity, multicultural education, and sociology. She has also contributed to business management textbooks on diversity and presented research on black identity development.
Dr. McNickles has made significant contributions to health equity, lecturing on Implicit Bias in Health Care and participating in the Institutional Review Board at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Her involvement with the Worcester Partnership for Racial and Ethnic Health Equity and her breast cancer awareness workshops for African American women have earned her recognition as a Hometown Hero by Worcester Magazine in 2019.

Committed to community service, Dr. McNickles has received awards such as the Eleanor Hawley Award for Human Rights in 2016 and the YWCA’s Erskine Award in education in 2019. She has also been actively involved in organizations like the ACLU, the Massachusetts Commission on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth, and the YWCA of Central Massachusetts, where she co-founded the Racial Justice Task Force. Furthermore, she served on Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s Advisory Council on Racial Justice and Equity from 2016 to 2023.

Dr. McNickles holds a master’s degree in social justice from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a doctorate in adult education with a focus on social justice from National-Louis University.