1. Please give a description of your company and the products/services you offer.

The Institute for Family Services is a family therapy and training center that has served individuals, families, and communities for more than 30 years. We provide family therapy, relationship counseling, professional training, and community healing programs. We train graduate students in Social Work, Counseling, and Marriage and Family Therapy, and support professionals who want to deepen their culturally responsive and socially conscious clinical practice. We also host our Annual Liberation Healing Conference and offer both short-term and year-long training programs for people who want to become Liberation Healers. Everything we do grows from one core belief: “People heal in connection.”

2. How long have you been in business?

For more than 30 years, the Institute for Family Services has helped families strengthen relationships, trained future therapists, and supported communities in creating pathways toward healing and wellbeing. For the past 21 years, we have created and led a National Liberation Based Healing Conference!

3. What inspired you to pursue your profession?

What inspired me to pursue this profession was my own lived experience. Growing up and living with a disability, my life was shaped not only by my own determination, but by a complex web of healers, caregivers, family, teachers, advocates, and community members who made it possible for me to thrive.

That experience taught me something central: healing is never individual. We do not become whole alone. We become whole through relationships, through community, and through the people who are willing to hold us, challenge us, guide us, and believe in our becoming. I also came to understand that I was privileged to have access to that rich matrix of care. Not everyone does. So my desire was to help build something akin to the community of healing that surrounded me — especially for families who have been isolated, harmed, or made to feel that their struggles are theirs alone.

That is why our guiding principle is so important to me: when families heal together, communities transform.
For me, this work is praxis. It is not just theory or service delivery. It is the joining of lived experience, reflection, action, and collective healing. It is taking what I have learned in my own life and using it to help create spaces where families can reconnect, reclaim dignity, and imagine new possibilities together.

4. Tell us about your business.

At the Institute for Family Services, we believe many struggles emerge and are sustained in relationships and systems. Ethical healing therefore includes accountability, repair, connection, and collective care—not only individual coping.

Many people come to us carrying pain, isolation, and disconnection. We help them move beyond survival and build lives grounded in healing, accountability, connection, and belonging.

Our work stands apart because we look beyond symptoms. We explore people’s lived experiences through their relationships, cultural experiences, social conditions, and community realities that shape people’s lives. By understanding the full context of a person’s experience, we create opportunities for deeper and more sustainable healing. We help children and youth overcome their challenges and develop paths of inspiration, families repair relationships, current and intergenerational, strengthen connections, navigate challenges, and create healthier patterns that support growth for generations.

I can share a brief example of a young man I’ll call Sam. Sam was fifteen when he was referred to us by his school for repeated conflicts with teachers and academic struggles. But what looked like “behavior problems” were really connected to deeper issues: family disconnection, low expectations, and a school environment that had already decided he was not “college material.” Sam wanted a stronger relationship with his father, so we brought his father into the work and helped rebuild that connection. At the same time, we worked with the school around classroom expectations, teacher relationships, and academic support. We also connected Sam with peers in the community who were honors students, and they helped awaken his curiosity and motivation. Over time, Sam began taking on harder assignments, asking for help, visiting colleges with his parents, and imagining a different future. What changed was not just Sam. The circle around him changed. His parents began to believe in his college dream too. Sam eventually received a scholarship to a four-year college. To me, that is the power of community healing: when family, school, and community stop seeing a young person as a problem and begin seeing their possibility.

Our Conference intentionally de-silos sources of knowledge by bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines including artists and musicians. It is the only National Conference that departs from the customary mental health and pathology focused design.

Our guiding principle is simple:
When families heal together, communities transform.