The Malama Collective

The mission of The Malama Collective is to provide training opportunities to aspiring psychoanalysts from diverse backgrounds, and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy to underserved communities within Orange County, California. I know this is our mission statement but I’m not sure about using analytic language for our campaign.I would suggest we use the blurb below.

Through our commitment to provide wellness services to regularly underserved populations, The Malama Collective aims to provide training opportunities to early career clinicians from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds with particular interest in psychoanalytic modalities of clinical work, and to foster an ethos of sensitivity to the complexities of contemporary social life.

As a psychoanalytically informed clinic, The Malama Collective provides treatment options at affordable rates to better ensure quality access to psychological services, particularly for long-term psychotherapeutic support.

The Malama Collective began with four psychotherapists, engaging the question of what it is to practice psychodynamically informed psychotherapy in a time of unparalleled division and crisis. As a result, The Malama Collective developed four key areas of focus that have become pillars of our organizational structure: Firstly, we offer quality, affordable psychotherapy to underserved members of the community. We seek to serve a wide range of clients, including those facing the greatest barriers to care. This became evident to each of us as we became increasingly aware of the overwhelming needs of our community during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. Upon further exploration and study of these concerns, we found a dearth of attention to this problem within traditional avenues to care. Secondly, we are committed to teaching the next generation of therapists to be sensitive and responsive to structural barriers to quality care. Similarly, as this commitment involves and requires us to be invested in a socially responsive kind of therapy, we value continuing education and dialog among therapists and clinicians. Like the first pillar mentioned, the need for this became overwhelmingly clear as we witnessed so many colleagues working to make sense of economic, racial, and structural oppression in order to provide clientele with the best possible care. We have taken that need to heart and have dedicated ourselves to being a resource to such clinicians. Thirdly, we are committed to community building, both in terms of mental health providers and in terms of community volunteers. Through our individual experiences, we found a need and a desire to connect with equally committed clinicians and community partners. As a result of our own desires to form meaningful networks of engaged participants, we seek to celebrate community building. Finally, The Malama Collective is engaged in continuing education and reflection of some of the most timely and relevant topics to contemporary clinical practice. We meet regularly for reading groups, classes for clinicians, and information sessions centered around on-going professional dialog on issues of access to care, best practices in underserved populations, and therapeutic technique. This, as with the other pillars, was a value garnered from experience in the field and the clear need for good continuing education for clinicians on these topics.

The Malama Collective serves several different populations within Orange County, all of which face varying degrees and types of impediment to quality psychological care. As a result, our impact is far-reaching and varied.

• We serve all of Orange County, and through tele-health, are able to provide services to those geographically impeded or unable to leave the home.
• We serve multiple populations often identified as at higher risk or as facing greater challenges to receiving quality and supportive health care services, including: adolescents in crisis, refugees, racial and religious minorities who experience minority stress, discrimination and marginalization, unhoused, uninsured and underinsured people, people struggling with substance misuse or abuse, disability or chronic illness, , neurodivergent folks, elderly people , as well as the LGBTQIA community of gender and sexual minorities.
• We offer family support services and dynamic family therapy, including a specific playroom area for therapy with children and adolescents.
• We offer four courses per year for early career clinicians on curricula related to treating underserved populations psychodynamically.
• We offer group therapy services for people sharing an interest in a particular topic or theme: couples’ groups, refugee groups, etc.

Overcoming obstacles to long-term care:
There are compounding needs for access to long-term psychological services for members of our communities facing under-employment, discrimination, and economic hardship. The Malama Collective remedies this by providing psychological support services on a sliding scale, based on income, and with an informed sensitivity to the social contexts and economic drivers of the uneven distribution of services in our community.

Professional development in key areas of structural disparities and obstacles to access:
The Malama Collective is dedicated to professional development programming, enabling early career clinicians to gain expertise in the structural obstacles many in our community face with regard to accessing health care services. This is a much-needed adjunct to on-going and continuing education in which all clinicians participate.

Community outreach and programing:
The Malama Collective is founded upon a principle of engaged community partnership. As a result, we have identified needs within our community for meaningful and psychologically informative events, group meetings, and support. Our community outreach and programming consists of art groups, support groups organized around common themes and concerns, as well as public lectures. It is our belief that such events diminish feelings of isolation, particularly prevalent in light of the pandemic.

We serve all of California, with an emphasis on Orange County.

The Malama Collective is a unique organization in Orange County. It was founded on a commitment to provide therapeutic services to people oven disenfranchised from access to long-term psychodynamic care. Similarly, this value of helping and care for those marginalized groups in our community further inspired The Malama Collective to train and educate clinicians with regard to best practices concerning this type of community engagement and clinical practice. So often therapeutic services are expensive or cumbersome to access through insurance. Further, many available clinical services, while essential, only focus on crisis management and are not able to help clients do the work of healing trauma, familial dynamics, or relationship concerns. The Malama Collective is dedicated to ensuring all members of our community have access to such services, irrespective of social circumstance.