welcome

“My dream is to help answer the call for healing from my family and community. The Lifeforce Initiative is the manifestation of this call- a space where healing of our communities is inseparable from our own healing. Lifeforce has helped me reclaim hope that training and working as a therapist does not need to result in burnout, fragmentation, colorlessness, spiritlessness, isolation, machination, impostor syndrome, and operating as if structural forces do not create individual distress within ourselves and our clients. Lifeforce gives me hope and evidence that we can create relationships and spaces where the process itself- rather than the destination- is healing; where our souls are acknowledged and first to be invited in; where our ethnic roots, tongues, and knowledge are requisite; and where we recognize that healing of individuals can never be severed from our fights for justice from daily & persistent systemic atrocities. Our current training institutions create trauma, dismemberment, and an imposed forgetting of who we are and how we heal. I, too, have forgotten my ancestral lineage along this journey; however, Lifeforce helped me reconnect to my ancestral wisdoms and capacities for healing. Lifeforce lets me know that yes, this is soul work! This is justice work! This is the healing we had survived for, deserve, and have the responsibility to advance.”

- Helen Kim, PH.D.

Undergraduate Summer Fellowship

While the lack of diversity, intersectionality & political consciousness within the field of mental health is becoming increasingly apparent, the field itself has yet to demonstrate an urgency to address or change this dynamic. The field of mental health seems satisfied to work at margins- developing “cultural competence” tools or hiring one “token” clinician of color or exploring neurological sources of “unconscious bias”. However, the calls for justice, reparation, and transformation echoing in the streets right now will eventually make their way to clinical training programs and therapy centers all over the country. This call will be an invitation for the field of mental health to reckon with its colonial underpinnings- a predominantly euro-centric, hyper-individualistic, and bio-medical approach to healing. And as the need for mental health becomes ubiquitous in this society, we will need an entirely new generation of healers. It is this vision that gave birth to the Lifeforce Initiative in the first place.

In our commitment to usher in this new generation of mental health professionals of color, we believe it is critical to create pipelines for young people to enter the field in a way that ensures their sustainability as healers. With this in mind, we created the Lifeforce Summer Fellowship for undergraduate students of color in 2019. This year, we are honored to have 24 incredible college students representing 9 different universities as a part of our fellowship.

Each fellow is expected to complete a rigorous selection of reading material, participate in discussion forums and provide a final presentation at the conclusion of their fellowship.

Application Deadline: April 1st, 2021

Liberation Academy

An educational training, enrichment and healing program meant to cultivate the next generation of decolonized mental health professionals of color. The academy admits graduate students of color and early career professionals in psychology, psychiatry, therapy, social work, and other allied fields. The vision of the academy is to bolster a movement for transformation within the field of mental health. Participants will receive political education, training on various forms of holistic healing, and a peer group of social-justice-oriented practitioners of color from around the country.

Lifeforce Conference 2019

Moments from 2019 CONFERENCE

EMBODIED LEARNING PRACTICE

If you are interested in learning more about the Lifeforce Initiative, please fill out the form below: