Sharon Leigh Young, PhD

Sharon Young is the CooperRiis Institute Director focusing on continual program development as well as insuring fidelity to CooperRiis values and principles. She is also charged with developing a methodology to help others learn the CooperRiis model as a way to actualize improved mental health care across the country. As a part of those efforts Sharon has offered a variety of trainings and consultation services in the United States and Canada and has published her work in multiple journals.

Although Sharon has worked in a variety of mental health settings including wilderness therapy settings, hospitals, community mental health centers, and a private practice setting, she has put the most effort in her professional career into establishing the CooperRiis programming which has included continual program development, implementation, and evaluation as well as provision of training, supervision, and direct services.

Sharon has also been committed to community service throughout her career. She was the recipient of scholarship leadership and scholarship athlete awards as a student and also earned service awards from the American Psychological Association and the Asheville Chapter of the American Red Cross. She's been a member of the Buncombe County Mental Health Task Force and the Advisory Board Member for the Asheville Family Visitation Center in addition to serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea, West Africa for two years.

A native Ohioan, Sharon was awarded a Graduate School University Fellowship for exceptional academic achievement at the University of Toledo in northern Ohio. She earned her Masters Degree and Doctoral Degree in Clinical Psychology there with a research specialty in the area of Mental Health Recovery. Sharon obtained a grant from the Ohio Department of Mental Health which funded her efforts to promote and actualize the progressive Recovery paradigm in the state of Ohio. It is the model that emerged from that research that now serves as the conceptual foundation for the Seven Domains of Recovery and for the holistic and hopeful approach that is foundational to the CooperRiis program. Sharon has had the opportunity to create an empirically validated recovery measure as well as specific recovery oriented interventions and has published and presented her research findings in multiple locations in the United States and Canada.

In her free time, Sharon loves to trail run, to travel, and to enjoy the natural beauty of Western North Carolina.