Ana Kerpan is a volunteer with Multnomah County's Department of Community Justice and winner of a 2015 Volunteer Recognition Award.
“Ana has thrived in her internship position. She is very self motivated and approaches tasks fearlessly. She assists in working with a population of clients supervised for sexual crimes, who are chronically/persistently mentally ill and assessed as being at high risk of reoffending sexually. She has skillfully interacted with these clients with patience, professionalism and kindness.
Parole/Probation Officers work with clients to help them build skills, address their specific criminogenic risk factors and make lifestyle changes needed to abstain from crime. Ana has been a key member at meetings discussing the particular challenges our clients present. Traditional cognitive interventions have not worked particularly well with several of my clients due to mental health responsively issues. Ana is part of a team working to adapt cognitive interventions so they can be used with the mentally ill. Ana has been insightful and very eager to learn in this area.
I often give Ana several different tasks to work on at the beginning of her work day and she is very skilled at prioritizing the tasks. She consistently completes the more important or time sensitive tasks first. She has shown skill in collaborating with other staff members while maintaining our Public Predatory Sexual Offender Notification Website. She has checked the website to ensure the information is accurate and up-to-date. When mistakes have been found she has contacted the appropriate people to remedy it.
Ana has shown great investigation skills while updating our Predatory Sexual Offender Notification website. She has checked each client for warrants and has made corrections to information regarding addresses, victim pools and method of offending. Obtaining this information requires a lengthy/detailed review of a client’s criminal history and case file.
In a very short time, Ana has successfully become certified and proficient at using all the various databases Parole/Probation Officers use. Her computer skills and ability to navigate through bureaucracy are assets which will greatly help her career development. Overall, Ana has been an excellent contributor to our team and I think she has great potential to make a career for herself within the community supervision field.”
— James Stevens of the Department of Community Justice’s Adult Services Division