Southeast > About > Staff > Lourdes M. Vázquez-Matienzo

Lourdes M. Vázquez-Matienzo, MSW — Senior Program Manager

Lourdes Vazquez serves CSAP's Southeast CAPT as State Coordinator for Training and Technical Assistance for Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Ms. Vázquez is a former State Incentive Grant Manager for Puerto Rico. After receiving her Master’s in Clinical Social Work from the University of Puerto Rico, she began her professional career as a Research Assistant in the graduate school of social work. Her first contact with the ATOD field was as a social worker in a residential facility for adolescents with drug abuse problems, then as director of an outpatient and day-drug treatment center for youth. From there she moved to the ATOD prevention field, working with youth, families, and the community in a housing project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She also served as Director of the San Juan Metropolitan Area Prevention Center and as Supervisor for several prevention centers in the Island. For five years, Ms. Vazquez was involved with the Southeast Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities (SERC) from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. As Coordinator for Puerto Rico for this special project, she was instrumental in the adoption of an evidenced-based view of prevention practice in the Island. She provided extensive training and technical assistance to school/community teams throughout Puerto Rico on the development and implementation of comprehensive prevention action plans and evaluation of prevention efforts. She entered the mental health field as clinical director of a mental health facility, and then as utilization and quality manager with the health reform in Puerto Rico. Ms. Vazquez has provided prevention consultant services to organizations, trained new grantees of CSAP’s Substance Abuse Prevention and HIV Prevention in Minority Communities Program, evaluated a prevention program implemented by the Sacred Heart University of Puerto Rico, and worked with low-income head-of-household women in towns around the Island. As the State Incentive Grant Manager for Puerto Rico, Ms. Vázquez facilitated the development of a comprehensive prevention system in Puerto Rico and assisted 18 subrecipients of SIG funds in the implementation of evidence-based practices in communities.