Meet Randy Maldonado

Randy Maldonado is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over twelve years of experience translating attachment science and family systems work into practice rooted in economic and cultural complexity. Beginning his career in after-school and community-based programming, he now specializes in work with adoptive families, mixed families, and multigenerational systems where financial trauma and cultural dislocation intersect with attachment and relational trauma across the lifespan. Drawing on his Latinx identity, lived experience, and artistic expression, Randy is certified in AEDP, EFT, and DDP, with additional training in SFT and FFT. A father of two boys and a blue belt competitor in Brazilian jiu jitsu, Randy brings somatic and embodied wisdom into his clinical work, using storytelling, metaphor, and visual guides rooted in his cultural heritage to support healing and connection.

Randy supervises clinicians in developing culturally responsive, family-centered practice, and his academic work at John Jay College—where he teaches a socio-emotional learning course to communities impacted by mass incarceration—earned him the Transformative Leadership Award. He consults across adoption services, school systems, and trauma-informed organizations, and helped develop the Racial Equity and Social Justice Committee within DDP. His work centers one conviction: attachment and healing happen most deeply when we see families whole—their cultural strengths, economic contexts, and structural positions—and practice with the humility that our clinical tools should bend toward their lives, not the reverse. Outside the clinical space, Randy is a science fiction reader, vinyl collector, and spoken word artist who brings creativity and cultural grounding to everything he does.