Values, Collaborative Care & Community Partnerships
Photo by: Tima Miroshnichenko
Our Values in Practice
We approach therapy as collaboration and practice client literacy. This approach reflects ancient indigenous cultural practices and ideologies and decades of research. Our collective wisdom and academic studies show that collaborative models create meaningfully in client decisions in the therapy room. Read our paper.
Partnerships & Community Work
Our commitment to collective care extends beyond the therapy room into partnerships with organizations desiring to provide education, wellness and mental health care to their staff and participants.
Liberation-Based Therapy also serves as fiscal sponsor and strategic partner of Globalizing Gender, a New York organization working to eradicate gender-based violence and expand access to culturally responsive survivor support in the U.S. and globally. Globalizing Gender addresses FGM/C, child and forced marriage, human trafficking, domestic violence, and other forms of gender-based harm through education, advocacy, and community engagement. This partnership combines clinical expertise with community-rooted advocacy for survivor-centered mental health.
We collaborate with aligned providers and organizations including Monarch Psychiatry and Center for Gender & Sexuality, whose work reflects shared commitments to ethical, inclusive, affirming care.
Over the years, we've partnered with arts and cultural organizations, educational institutions, businesses, legal and advocacy firms, domestic violence and sexual assault nonprofits, and city agencies. In all community work, we uphold strict confidentiality and ethical standards, prioritizing the safety and trust of those involved.
Community Care & Collective Healing
We understand emotional distress as shaped by relationships, systems, and social conditions. We are not interested in pathologizing conceptualization of the human condition. This framework draws from liberation psychology, which positions psychology's primary task as "helping people develop the tools to analyze and transform their reality themselves" (Martín-Baró, 1994), rather than interpreting that reality for them.
Many people enter treatment labeled "non-compliant," "resistant," or "hard to engage." People aren’t failures, the model of care that ignored culture, language, family systems, or lived experience often creates rupture.
We desire for our work to expand beyond any perceived limitation. Care may include family or chosen family (with consent), coordination with psychiatric or medical providers, collaboration with schools or organizations, and treatment plans that reflect a client's cultural and relational reality. We value agency.
Community care also means naming how power, race, gender, immigration status, language access, and economic conditions shape mental health. Growth happens in relationships where "power differentials are acknowledged and negotiated collaboratively rather than obscured" (Watkins & Shulman, 2008). In other words, healing strengthens when people develop shared language, collective understanding, and plans that work in their real lives. To pull a quote from adriene mare brown’s Pleasure Activism (2019) “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”