Roots Wellness Center is a grassroots community mental health organization that began in 2013, but the story of this organization started long before then—with my birth, my displacement, and my lived experience inside systems that were never built for community well being or those who are structurally undervalued. Instead of stability and support, my birthmother was met with stigma, surveillance, and the punitive responses that define child welfare and mental health systems for Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant families.

I was adopted into an all-white Minnesota family as the only person of color, which caused racial isolation, cultural disconnect, or the deep wounds of colonial displacement. That dislocation shaped my identity—and later, it shaped the founding of Roots Wellness Center. I learned firsthand that the systems designed to “help”—child welfare, mental health, corrections, and the addiction industrial complex—were never built by or for people who are outcast from mainstream, traditional norms and approaches, approaches that reproduce trauma, separate families, and profit off of people’s pain and oppression.

Overcoming traumatic experiences in the mental health industrial complex for its lack of cultural responsivity, trauma expertise and ancestral healing practices, is the reason RWC exists. We are about creating alternative programs and pathways for us, by us. For community, by community. We evolve, innovate and create programs based on community need.

These experiences led to our unique approach that rejects punitive, shame-based, Western clinical models and instead embraces the knowledge our ancestors carried long before anyone named “trauma.” This philosophy evolved into our organizational model, Regulate to Liberate—a holistic, culturally grounded framework.