Erica Woodland (He/Him/His)
Founder & Executive Director
Erica Woodland, LCSW is a Black queer, trans masculine/genderqueer facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist and healing justice practitioner who was born, raised, and is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He has worked at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans and queer justice and liberation for more than 20 years. He has extensive experience working with young people, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities across the country, from Baltimore to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Erica is the Founding Director of the NQTTCN and under his leadership, the organization has trained and mobilized hundreds of mental health practitioners committed to intervening on the legacy of harm and violence of the medical industrial complex while building liberatory models of care rooted in abolition.
Erica came into liberation and healing work in the early 2000s by way of harm reduction and abolitionist organizing with survivors of state, community and interpersonal violence. Working at the nexus of collective care and political liberation has been central to his practice as a clinician, facilitator, and healer. From 2012-2016, Erica served as the Field Building Director for the Brown Boi Project, a national gender justice organization, where he led movement building work to transform masculinity and confront sexism, misogyny, and queer/transphobia.
Erica is co-editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, with Cara Page (North Atlantic Books, 2023). In 2017, he was awarded the Ford Public Voices Fellowship and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders Fellowship. Erica’s op-eds have been featured in Role Reboot, Yoga International and Truthout and his healing justice work has also been highlighted in Time magazine, CNN, Healthline, Complex, and the New York Times. He is also a principal author of Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois (Brown Boi Project, 2011).
Anjali Alimchandani, Ph.D., MPP, (pronouns: she/her) is an Indian American, cisgender, queer-identified psychologist, currently working in both the Homeless Patient Aligned Care Team and the Transgender Care Team at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center (GLA VA), as well as in private practice. She completed her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at New York University in late 2015 and a Masters in Public Policy (MPP) at Harvard University in 2006. Her clinical and research passions include the provision of culturally responsive, justice informed psychotherapy for marginalized populations facing a multitude of complex mental and social health issues (PTSD, complex trauma, substance use disorders, psychosis, etc.), intersections of oppression with trauma and other mental health issues, contributing factors to resiliency within oppressed groups, and the intersections of psychology practice with social justice advocacy. In addition to helping develop the transgender care team services at the GLA VA, Anjali has provided multiple trainings/presentations on client-centered care for transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) individuals to psychiatry, psychology, and primary care staff members and residents/trainees at GLA VA, and is invited annually lecture on this topic for first-year medical students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine. She held a Health Sciences Assistant Clinical Professor position at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine in 2018-2019 and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor position within the Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) program at the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to coming to the field of psychology, Anjali worked in a variety of fields aimed at social justice promotion, including public policy/human rights advocacy, domestic violence prevention/response, international development, and direct social services with refugee and “at-risk” youth. Her commitment to healing justice began in the wake of recognizing that in the context of structural oppression, healing, in and of itself, is a form of activism, that psychological healing and resilience are integral to building community-driven sustainable social justice movements, and that healing compassionate justice can liberate us all.
Violeta is a spirit, human, and black woman and femme invested in deep soul work, intergenerational trauma, and generative healing. Her commitment to this work is rooted in systemic change and ancestral backing. She is clear that systemic harm robs us of our wholeness and our ability to see ourselves in our fullness. As a healing justice practitioner and mental health professional, she deeply believes that community-care and self-care are dialectically linked - one informs the other and that decolonial therapy practices can amplify that healing at the biological, psychological, social, spiritual levels