I am pursuing my Master of Public Health at UCLA to build what I could not find growing up in South Los Angeles: a place where Black, brown, queer people could receive mental health care from practitioners who understand the histories we carry in our bodies. The mental health crisis in our communities is the predictable outcome of chronic stress produced by structural inequity, compounded by a medical system with a documented history of racial bias and by care models designed without us in mind. Even when treatment is nominally available, it remains financially out of reach, culturally illegible, or delivered by providers who cannot recognize what our symptoms are responding to. The consequence is that our suffering is read as pathology rather than as an accurate response to the conditions producing it. For 15 years I have designed trauma-informed, culturally competent healing programming for communities the wellness industry was never built to serve, integrating evidence-based mindfulness practice, emerging neuroscientific research, artistic & creative intervention, and ancestral wisdom traditions. My contribution is The Cove: a holistic wellness center in South Los Angeles where mental health care, culinary nutrition, and community gathering live under one roof, delivered on a sliding scale by practitioners who share the lived experience of the people they serve. It is a space where cost never determines who receives care, where no one is required to translate themselves at the door, and where the caliber of what we offer remains constant regardless of what anyone can pay.

My goal is to become a public health practitioner and community clinician who dismantles the structural barriers keeping Black communities from mental health care and medical dignity. I'm pursuing my MPH at UCLA to build the skills needed to do this work systematically. My dream is to open The Cove in South LA: a boutique wellness center and health food restaurant evolving from #WeStillGottaEat, a public health and structural equity intervention I founded that raised over half a million dollars to combat food apartheid and redistribute wealth to families in South LA. Mental health disparities in Black communities are embedded in medical bias and structural neglect. The mental health crisis in Black communities goes untreated because providers don't recognize trauma responses as rational reactions to chronic racial stress and historical medical exploitation. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. Black patients receive inadequate pain management. Mental health conditions go undiagnosed because providers view Black emotional expression through a lens of bias, not pathology. Studies show these disparities shrink when patients are treated by providers who share their race and understand their lived experience. Public health taught me that my role isn't just to treat patients but to interrupt the systems creating illness in the first place. Trauma-informed care means understanding that my Black patients carry intergenerational trauma from medical racism, police violence, and systemic inequality. This shapes how they present symptoms, trust providers, and engage with treatment. A trauma-informed approach means naming the system that created their distrust and instead, listening without judgment, offering agency in treatment decisions, and restoring power that the medical industry has historically stolen. Cultural competency means understanding that depression in a Black patient might present as anger or withdrawal because emotional suppression kept our ancestors alive. It means asking about racism and financial strain, not just serotonin levels. It means recognizing that healing requires addressing both individual symptoms and the systems causing them. I've spent over a decade building partnerships with organizations like Google, NAACP, and UNESCO. But I kept hitting the same wall: we can consult, we can design programs, we can speak into systems. But without a physical space rooted in community, without infrastructure we control, we're still asking Black people to fit into spaces designed to harm them. The Cove changes that. It's our space. Built on our terms. By us, for us. My goal is to build a practice that becomes a counter-space to medical racism. I want to mentor the next generation of Black clinicians who will refuse to reproduce the bias they've internalized. I want to work toward systemic change: advocating for trauma-informed protocols in healthcare settings, pushing for mental health integration into primary care for marginalized communities, and training other providers to recognize their own biases. Racial diversity in healthcare is essential because medicine without diversity reproduces harm. We need providers who understand the difference between pathology and adaptation, who won't gaslight patients, and who can offer solutions rooted in patients' actual lives.