Professional Experience in Champaign-Urbana

• Champaign County Operation Snowball (Current Executive Director of this peer counseling program for high school age teens.)
• The Pavilion, psychiatric hospital
• Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation, Former Executive Director
• Champaign County Mental Health Board, Former Youth Services Coordinator
• Mental Health Center of Champaign County: Child/Adolescent Program
• Children's Home and Aid Society
• Prairie Center Health Systems

An Illinois Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (L.C.P.C.), and a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (C.R.C.), he has worked over twenty years in the areas of mental health, substance abuse, education and juvenile justice, covering a range of age populations, including teens, adults and seniors.

In 1979, Robert Silverman completed an internship with psychiatrist, Raymond Robertson, M.D., in Westmont, Illinois. Dr. Robertson worked with adults and families at the Riveredge psychiatric hospital and in his private practice. Besides being the Clinical Director of the hospital's intensive adolescent unit, he was also a Gestalt therapist with a private practice assisting clients develop what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed, Self-Actualization. Dr. Robertson utilized the self-awareness methods of Gestalt therapy not only with individual clients, but especially in his weekly therapy groups and the regularly held, therapeutic weekends. After completing this internship, Robert Silverman received further training in the self-awareness methods of Gestalt Therapy and today uses these, along with other cognitive-behavioral therapeutic methods, in his own counseling practice.

In 1985, Robert Silverman earned a Master of Fine Art's degree (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where he taught writing for two years. In 1992-93, he was one of thirteen artists in the Arad Arts Project, Israel. In 1995 he was trained to be an interviewer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 1994 to collect and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.