The Institute for Family Services (IFS) is a team of family therapists committed to producing change that embraces safe, respectful, nurturing and empowering relationships for all individuals, communities & families …
The 21st Annual Liberation Based Healing Conference will be held on November 6th and 7th
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The Institute for Family Services (IFS) was founded in 1990. Our dedicated team of family/liberatory therapists is known for creating safe, respectful, and empowering relationships for individuals, families, and communities from diverse backgrounds and lifecycle stages. With decades of experience and innovative programs, we’ve become a trusted name not just in New Jersey, but across the nation.
We transform families and communities through Family Therapy/Client Service, Post-Graduate Training/Internships, & Our Annual National Liberation Based Healing Conference.
The Institute for Family Services’ foundational practices and liberation-based healing praxis continue to inform graduate education, clinical training, and scholarship across mental health disciplines.
Our work has been acknowledged in family therapy scholarship and training texts, including discussions of intersectionality, social location, privilege, and decolonizing practices. These frameworks invite clinicians to understand individuals, families, and communities within the broader social, cultural, historical, and political contexts that shape emotional well-being, relationships, access to care, and opportunities for healing.
Liberation-based healing moves beyond pathologizing individuals or focusing only on symptom reduction. It centers resilience, resistance, cultural knowledge, community connection, and the restoration of dignity. In this way, therapeutic practice becomes not only a clinical process, but also a collective commitment to justice, belonging, and transformation.
Reference:
Gehart, D. R. (2023). Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy: A Practical Approach to Theories and Clinical Case Documentation (3rd ed.). Cengage Learning.
Intersectionality refers to the fact that classifications such as race, gender, and class should not be considered in isolation from one another because the dynamics of oppression cannot be easily disentangled (Almeida & Tubbs, 2020).
Instead, it is more accurate to consider a person’s identity as developed at the intersecting points of their gender, socioracial, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, immigration, ability-based, linguistic, health, religious, family, national, and other identities.
Social location refers to considering a person within this complex matrix of identities rather than a single or handful of identities. Considering any one of these identities outside of the context of others impedes meaningful understanding.
Privilege refers to social and biological identifiers, such as skin color, biological sex, heritage, age, education, and class, that give an individual special status and advantages when possessed in a given community.
Privilege can take the form of:
Our clinicians strive to recognize how systems of privilege and oppression impact emotional wellbeing, family relationships, access to care, and opportunities for healing.
The historic processes of colonization involved privileging the social, cultural, and economic capital of colonizers over indigenous peoples, resulting in profoundly invalidating indigenous and colonized peoples’ ways of life.
Colonization represented abuses of power on entire communities and nations, often through controlling institutional narratives informing history, education, and access to resources.
Decolonizing practices seek to liberate clients from these dynamics by reconnecting individuals, families, and communities with their native cultures, knowledges, resilience, and strengths.
In today’s postcolonial era, coloniality can continue through cultural imperialism that restricts rights, resources, and representation for disadvantaged groups while controlling dominant institutional narratives….”
Our philosophy is to embrace the resilience that all families and individuals bring to therapy and create a landscape of liberation in resolving life’s struggles. We do not define our clients by the particular identity of their presenting problems but rather by their multiple and complex identities.
The structure of families today range from the traditional nuclear families, single parent families, extended families, etc. living together, each with different and similar challenges including ...
Liberation Based Practice Trainees receive didactic and live supervision in the clinic, working with wide trajectories of families, including Spanish language clients, that are navigating multiple systems ...
Please contact us if you would like to discuss a tailored workshop for your organization. Our team has experience working with youth & adolescents, educators, social workers and mental health ...
The Liberation Based Healing Conference (LBHC) is an annual, two-day event that brings together scholars, activists, educators, students, staff and community members from all over the U.S. to engage in collective discourse about how coloniality shows up in traditional education and therapeutic models.
The Liberation-Based Healing conference was first envisioned by Dr. Rhea Almeida, director of the Institute for Family Services in NJ. She and her colleagues, Lisa Dressner, Judy Lockard, Pilar Hernandez-Wolfe, and Andrae Brown developed and expanded the conference over the past years with many others having collaborated with this initiative. They include, Mabel Quinones, Rebecca Chaisson, Judy Lewis, Nocona Pewewardy, Cornel Pewewardy, Marilyn Armour, Gail Rice, Diana Melendez, Jose Paez, Willie Tolliver, Carolyn Tubbs, Mayida Zaal, CMO Tri-County….and the list continues to grow.
The conference grew out of a general disillusionment by scholars and those they were serving, with mainstream conferences in the mental health fields (Social work, Family therapy & Counseling) …
“What didn’t I enjoy about the conference? I had been feeling very drained this past week. But after being at the conference yesterday, I felt my cup was full again. I was surrounded by like-minded people. I loved how we were openly talking about how we could help our students, regardless of age, from the […]
“Thank you to everyone for presenting the work you do and allowing us to see a specific case study and how the model itself works to support clients. I feel there is a lot that can be used through the different aspects of liberation based healing practices that can help many different populations in the […]
“Thank you Dr. Almeida, Emilia, Alexis, Lakeisha, and Eunjung! You all were wonderful and it was great to learn from your insight and knowledge. Liberation Based Healing has been intriguing to me since I learned about it this semester so to see a case study as a visual representation of your work was very beneficial […]
“Thank you again Dr. Almeida, Lakeisha, Emilia, Alexis, Eunjung (I hope i’m not forgetting anyone lol) for coming into our class space and sharing with us all the work that y’all have been doing. I am so empowered and inspired by the liberation based healing practices framework and want to learn more about how i […]
“I really loved seeing (visually) how liberation-based healing practices work. But I especially loved how a few of the facilitators talked about how much they had to unlearn themselves in order to participate in these circles. It really reminds me of the idea of institutional infiltrators–facilitators who are disrupting the “norm” in order to promote […]
“I really appreciate the perspective that Dr. Almeida has and the work she is doing within social work because it is incredibly needed. Everything within this field and within social services are so individualized and just reinforce that idea that everything is on you and nothing can be at a level higher than that. It […]
“My name is Dr. J. Corey Williams, MD. My colleague and I at Georgetown have become very interested in your work surround Liberation-based Healing. Over the course of the last year, we have started a reading and discussion group focused on liberation-based healing practices to begin interrogating how liberation can be applied to our clinical […]
“I thought I came here for therapy. What I received was a gift of life that included learning how to be a man in today’s world both in my home and at work. I feel more loved at home and my work colleagues describe me as more caring and competent than ever.”
“My name is Diana Jauregui and I am an MSW student at California State University Northridge. I had the privilege and pleasure of attending the Liberation Based Healing Conference in St. Louis this past weekend. I wanted to take the time to congratulate and thank you all for organizing such an empowering conference. This is […]
“I never imagined that learning new notions of masculinity such as expanded emotionality, embracing femininity, balancing work and family life, embracing relatedness over individualism, valuing collaboration, maintaining flexibility, valuing shared power of relatedness, could make a better and more courageous man.”
