September’s Featured Member:
Calvin Moore II, LMFT, MDiv

This month I would like to feature another member of our LA-CAMFT chapter. Each month I will continue to write about our members and their connection to our chapter. As CFO, I can write all day about being involved in our chapter. I feel hearing from other members is more authentic and genuine for all of you.

For each month’s Member Spotlight, I’ll be reaching out to our members to write about their experiences in our chapter. If you would like me to write about you and why you’re a member of our chapter, please email me at CFO@lacamft.org.

This month I’d like to introduce, Calvin Moore II, LMFT. Enjoy reading more about Cal in his own words.

In February 2012 I became a member of LA-CAMFT as a pre-licensed therapist. Now that I’m licensed, I’m celebrating my 7th year going strong as a member. Here’s how I came to be the LA-CAMFT member I am today.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, by a hard-working mother who raised me by herself after my father died when I was almost two-years-old. I also grew up with a mild form of epilepsy and watched her care for me as she worked without taking days off so that she could be there if I needed her. Furthermore, when I was in high school, I watched her work all day, care for me, and then fall asleep studying for her master’s degree. This was the example set for me in the house where I was raised and it has stuck with me until this day: study hard, work hard, care for those you love and help them when they need you, and keep God first in your life.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from UCLA and loved learning about how society impacts the actions, thoughts and feelings of people—especially when it comes to the issue of race! One of my most memorable classes was the last ‘Stratification, Race and Ethnicity’ class of the quarter wherein the professor, who was a young white man, explained to us how apartheid in South Africa was strictly an economic enterprise having nothing to do with race. I sat there seething in anger but not responding to his comments and drawing attention to myself, and then noticed that most of the students—who were majority white—were arguing him down to such a degree that he ended the class early. In that moment, I saw how a member of the ‘system’, the professor, could justify its evils and that there were some people of different colors willing to speak up against it. It inspired me!

Growing up with a love of the Lord and going to church, I went to seminary (graduate school for clergy) at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. There I learned about cold, stuffed pizza and the study of Pastoral Care and Counseling. I took to the subject of Pastoral Care and Counseling right away; so much so, that in my second semester in seminary my professor, Rev. Dr. Homer Ashby Jr., encouraged me to do peer counseling at the Englewood Community Health Organization in the area of the South Side of Chicago known as Englewood.

The community of Englewood was almost all Black, which I was comfortable with, 75% functionally illiterate, and had a poverty rate of 90%, which I was not at all familiar with. I had one client the whole semester, a 16-year-old who was quickly becoming an active gang member. He had been arrested repeatedly and was functionally illiterate. He and I had nothing in common except for the fact that we were young and Black. Every night I took the bus home angry with myself about what an awful job I had done that day! But, when I got home every night, I noticed that I felt a rush and couldn’t wait to go back and suck some more!

After graduating from seminary, I came home to L.A. and suffered through a year of being unemployed because jobs were so scarce. In 1994, I began a two-year Chaplain Residency at UCLA Medical Center where we worked five days a week and were on-call every third night. These two years were extremely taxing emotionally and physically, but it was here that I learned two important lessons that stick with me today: 1) Sometimes, you have to admit when you can’t do something, and 2) Regardless of what we believed as individuals, we were there to meet the patients’ needs, not our own, so they set the agenda of the visit and we cared for them by respecting it.

An example of the first lesson was that I got a call that a motorcyclist was being brought into the hospital after a bad accident. When he got to the emergency room, they cut off his clothes (which was customary) and when his shirt came off he had a swastika tattooed on his arm and the words “White Power” tattooed boldly on his stomach. One of the things we were trained to do when we faced something we didn’t think we could handle in the emergency was to tell the doctor in charge that you were going to leave and why. When I saw his tattoos, I told the doctor I was leaving and before I could tell him why, he said he understood.

While in this chaplain residency, I began working with people suffering with Sickle Cell Disease—a blood disease that affects mostly Black people in the United States. I led a sickle cell support group there for four years even though I became the Presbyterian staff chaplain at LAC+USC Medical Center in 1997. There I was introduced to the Sickle Cell Clinic that was on the hospital site and became the sickle cell chaplain until I left in 2005.

While serving at the LAC+USC Medical Center, and having a real passion for working with people with sickle cell disease, I came to realize that many of them needed not only the pastoral care I was providing, but also clinical care that they were not getting at all. That’s what inspired me to go to Pepperdine and get my master’s in clinical psychology with an MFT Emphasis. I did my training at South Bay Counseling Center, LA Center for Positive Change, and in private practice with Dr. Michael Pariser in West LA. I became a licensed therapist in March 2019.

Now that I’m licensed, I’m in private practice. I work out of two offices, one in Culver City, and the other at the Los Angeles church where I pastor. I work with individuals, couples, and families as well as with those who have mental health struggles related to chronic disease, race, spirituality, and the difference between what men are taught it means to ‘be a man’ and what it really means.

As a therapist, I feel honored, just as I did as a chaplain, to be trusted with inner struggles people have and I’m determined to work and with them through it. Much of my professional life, though, I’ve felt like a "Lone Ranger" doing all this caregiving by myself, but I’ve learned through LA-CAMFT that I’m not a Lone Ranger, and that I can network with and be supported by others in the field. This, more than anything, is why I feel that LA-CAMFT is so important to me!

Valerie "Billie" Klayman, M.A., LMFT, an integrative Meaning Centered Therapist, became a supervisor at Antioch University Counseling Center in 2014. Billie initiated a partnership between AUCC and the Culver City Senior Center offering pro-bono therapy and group therapy to members of CCSC. December 2016, Culver City hired Billie to help residents of the community at the Culver City Senior Center. She’s presented on Substance Abuse and Addiction. Billie can be reached at cfo@lacamft.org.