President’s Column

Relevance, Community, & the Work Ahead

President’s Column

Relevance, Community, & the Work Ahead

By Adam B. Lewin, PhD, ABPP

I’m writing to you now to introduce myself and, more importantly, to tell you my plans to make participating in SCCAP activities worth your time.  My vision is for SCCAP to be the professional home for clinical child and adolescent psychologists.  My mission is to build relevance across the career span for child and adolescent psychologists.  Over the coming year, my focus will be on aligning our programs, meetings, and resources with the realities of contemporary practice, training, leadership, and research — so that SCCAP feels not just important, but a unique professional community for clinical child and adolescent psychology.

Background & foundations: By way of introduction, my professional background has been shaped by work at the intersection of clinical practice, academic medicine, leadership, and science. I am a practicing clinician in an academic medical center, where my responsibilities span direct patient care; leadership of interdisciplinary teams of psychologists, advanced practice providers, and physicians; and oversight of training programs, sponsored research, and clinical operations. My work also includes funded research and clinical trials aimed at improving outcomes for children, adolescents, and families. These experiences have strongly informed how I think about systems, sustainability, and the conditions under which high quality work is possible.  It also reminds me of the gaps in training and professional development that could have supported me and other clinical child and adolescent psychologists in navigating the systems within with which we work.

This perspective shapes how I view SCCAP’s mission at this moment.

Our changing landscape:  The workforce reality for clinical child and adolescent psychology is changing. Career paths are increasingly diverse and rooted in health service delivery rather than traditional academic silos. Most of today’s trainees and early career colleagues will work in hospitals and/or medical centers, integrated care settings, schools, community systems, private practice, or telepractice environments—often balancing clinical care, supervision, leadership, and administrative demands.

If SCCAP is to be the professional home for clinical child and adolescent psychologists, we must intentionally build for the current and future workforce.

A central reality underlies this effort: the real competition for engagement is not other organizations or meetings—it is time and revenue. For many practicing clinicians, participation means fewer patients seen and less income earned that day. It also competes with family time, rest, and sustainability. That reality raises the bar for us as a Society.

Our standard must therefore be high. Does this help someone do their job better? Does it make their work more sustainable? Does it help them lead more effectively within complex systems of care? In 2026 and beyond, relevance means meeting members where they are—not where we wish they were.

Creating an experience.  Relevance is practical and transferable. It is content members can use Monday morning, whether they work in a hospital, school system, community clinic, or private practice. Education is widely available, yet people return year after year to the same meetings even when content repeats. They do so not only for information, but for professional community. Content opens the door; community brings people back.

For clinicians to take a pay cut to attend a meeting, SCCAP must offer more than high quality lectures. We must offer a professional home – a place to reconnect with colleagues, mentor and recruit, debate ideas, and build lasting professional relationships.

At the same time, many psychologists experience gaps in preparation for the systems that shape whether their work is sustainable. While training is strong in assessment, treatment, and research, there is often limited preparation for productivity expectations, billing and coding, compensation models, organizational metrics such as wRVUs, reimbursement structures, integrated behavioral health models, or the evolving business frameworks of telehealth. Yet these realities define professional life across settings.

If SCCAP is to be the professional home for practicing clinical child and adolescent psychologists, we must help members navigate how the work actually works.  We must also maintain relevance across the career span. 

For this reason, a core theme of my presidency is that 2026 will be a year to boldly experiment. We will pilot new content areas, new formats, and new engagement pathways. This includes programming focused on the business and systems side of practice; exploring formats beyond the traditional lecture webinar, such as complex case discussions and second opinion reviews; and testing ways to better bridge science and practice in applied, meaningful ways. 

Roadmap for 2026. This experimentation fits within a broader roadmap: piloting and learning in 2026 via webinars and select programs, refining in a training focused setting in 2027 through an augmented Clinical Practice Institute, and iterating toward a more integrated conference program in 2028. This roadmap will be the focus.  Throughout, we will rely on data, experience, and member feedback to guide decisions. The goal is to create content that builds community. We have many choices among our subspecialty and research societies; SCCAP is the true home for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. Let us build the content and community needed to maintain relevance across the career span.

My focus as President is content and program—but the end goal is community and home. There are many paths to that outcome, and this is a shared mission. I invite members to bring ideas, challenge assumptions, and help us prioritize through a simple guiding lens: SCCAP’s relevance for the practicing clinical child and adolescent psychologist.

With appreciation,

Adam B. Lewin, PhD, ABPP
Board Certified Child & Adolescent Psychologist
President, Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology