increasing diversity & cultural competence
in the helping professions...
...for clients ...for students ...for donors & volunteers
About Us
"...we
need a psychology that...awaken[s] us to our entanglements in
strategies of dissociation, to the despair of trauma, to grief from
mourning, and to potential joy in restoration and healing. Only such a
psychology could move us from a fatalism that unconsciously yields to
the status quo, to tentative hope for gradual transformation of
ourselves and for the communities where we are standing and placing our
advocacies."
----Mary Watkins & Helen Shulman
Toward Psycholoogies of Liberation, 2008, p.31
WHO ARE WE?
Founded in July of 2007, The Relational Center is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity whose mission is to increase
diversity in the helping professions and to expand access to culturally
competent counseling, coaching and consulting for individuals,
families, organizations and communities. We are committed to serving
people of color, sexual minorities, and people who are multiply
diagnosed with mental and physical illness, chemical dependency and
poverty. The Relational Center achieves these important aims through
training programs to helping professionals while conducting that
training in the context of providing wellness services directly to the
public.
The Relational Center is committed to ensuring that more people of color and other minorities enter the fields of mental health care and organizational development, influence service delivery, and reshape theories of human behavior to take into account the perspectives and cultural differences of their own communities. By increasing the diversity of helping professionals, The Relational Center is ensuring expanded access to appropriate, culturally sensitive, high-quality services for underreached groups, including people of color, sexual minorities, and economically disadvantaged communities. With our focus on consumer-driven service planning and evaluation, The Relational Center is putting influence back into the hands of the people in greatest need of help. To guarantee services are accessible and usable, we are committed to designing all of our programs to accommodate our consumers' unique situations, including their limitations and their strengths. The programs and services offered by The Relational Center are designed to be critiqued and redesigned by the people we want to help.
Copyright 2007. The Relational Center. All rights reserved.
