Cara Page, a co-architect of the Healing Justice framework and co-author of Healing Justice Lineages with Erica Woodland, talks with two other people in front of a wall covered with large sheets of paper displaying handwritten text and diagrams.

Origin Story

NQTTCN was officially launched in May 2016 as a call to organize mental health practitioners into a network where therapists could deepen their analysis of healing justice, and where Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (QTBIPOC) communities could connect to radical, politicized care. The seeds for this vision were planted in 2015, when founder Erica Woodland sent an email to close colleagues and comrades, naming the urgent need for a national space for queer and trans practitioners of color to strengthen a liberatory ecosystem of care for QTBIPOC.

Erica was deeply inspired by the work of Queer Therapists of Color (QTOC), a grassroots collective founded in 2009 to provide support and leadership development for mental health practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from his clinical practice and movement-building experience, Erica envisioned a national network that could meet the spiritual, emotional, and political needs of QTBIPOC both offering and seeking collective care and safety.

Through his national movement building work, Erica had seen firsthand the mental health toll carried by QTBIPOC leaders—many of whom were navigating trauma, burnout, suicidality, and structural barriers to care within both movement spaces and the broader field of mental health. NQTTCN emerged in direct response to those realities: isolation, racism, queer and transphobia, criminalization, ableism, lack of spaces for practitioners’ political development, and the structural failures of the medical industrial complex.

In the months following its launch, NQTTCN quickly grew into a vibrant community of collective care, resource sharing, and learning. Early volunteers and supporters—including some who would later serve as staff and advisory board members—came from both health, mental health, healing and organizing backgrounds, bringing a range of lived experiences and practices into the space.

Today, NQTTCN continues to sit at the intersection of mental health and social justice movements, with a deepened mandate to build abolitionist ecosystems of care for our people.