Meet Cheyanne (They/Them)
Community Organizer and MSW & LCSW
About Me
I have been trained in Afrocentric Clinical Social Work and have been a community organizer for the past 10 years. All of the work I do in my life is aimed at encouraging the mental, emotional, physical and material wellness of those in the Global Majority. My work is grounded in my community organizing experience and therapeutic modalities such as CBT, DBT, ACT and Solution Focused and social skills building. I have experience in working with marginalized communities such as: polyamorous, queer and trans populations, folks with depression, folks with anxiety, neurodiverse folks, those moving through grief, etc.
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Personally I am a queer Caribbean Indigenous neurodiverse individual. All of our work together will be based in benefiting your liberation. Your liberation, means my liberation. Pathologizing oppression and its pervasiveness is the lens I work through not only for you, but for myself as well
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I am not Iyanla, I cannot fix your life. Although I can provide a space to work through hard and heavy emotions as a team. We will go at your pace, asses your goals and needs required to make sense of your world. We will aim to have you gain a greater sense of self and develop the skill of self accommodation.
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The Liberation Health Model
The Liberation Health model was created by social workers from Boston University. Cheyannes Joynt life coaching sessions and community classes are based in a liberation health framework which is ever changing and informed by our clients. The mission of Cheyannes Joynt is to provide accessible, relevant, and empowering collaborative care to communities of the Global majority and our accomplices.
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We believe in the process of having an analysis of social determinants coupled with understanding the emotional energy it requires to interact with social determinants. We want to honor and respect the current and historical emotional/intellectual knowledge that the community has done by having local community members participate in the process of peer support. We have chosen to center marginalized folks in order to normalize the act of taking up the space that they deserve to exist in by themselves in a world that denies that.
The psychological knowledge and tools mental health workers have are typically not accessible to the larger community. Higher education pushes those who engage in it to gatekeep information through incentivization. Decentralizing care for our communities and refusing to rely on colonial structures of legitimization means that our care is not documented in an Electronic Health System. Decentralizing serves two functions: less formal documentation = less tracking and allows Cheyannes Joynt to offer low cost group and individual space for emotional learning for everyone, not just those with insurance.
What does that mean for you? It means to care for your mental health, we are in actuality performing anti-colonial work. Cheyannes Joynt is attempting to dismantle the idea that your mental health is individual work that can only be done through formal therapy. Our health is communally shaped, let's turn back to the community to reshape it.