Inner Justice Works provides high-quality psychotherapy, specializing in gender care and trauma treatment, for community members holding oppressed identities and marginalized experiences. We are currently in process of transforming from a for-profit small business to a worker self-directed nonprofit agency.

Mission Statement:

Inner Justice Works seeks to both support individual trauma survivors who hold oppressed experiences, and also impact at the structural level some of the policies, systems, and institutions that contribute most directly to continued harm and trauma in the lives of our clients and the communities they call home. 

We do this through providing direct social work services and mental healthcare, and also by engaging directly in systems change and advocacy work, to better embody solidarity with the survivors we serve at the root level.

Vision Statement

We envision a world in which social location, identity, and community of origin are not social determinants of health. We work for a world in which there is both equitable access to care for  all, and one in which the rates of exposure to trauma, violence, and harm are reduced through tackling oppression at its root. 

We embrace the values of…

• abolitionist social work practice
• Anti-racist social work practice
• collaborative and integrative care
• multisystemic and holistic interventions
• decarcerated care and transformative justice
• informed consent and bodily autonomy
• harm reduction and client-led and client-centered care. 

We challenge ourselves daily to better understand and meet the needs of oppressed survivors — in particular, trans and nonbinary survivors, BIPOC survivors, poor and low-income or working class survivors, d/Disabled survivors, sex workers and other survivors engaged in criminalized or survival economies, survivors in recovery from addictions, survivors of the criminal punishment system or other forms of State violence, survivors living in bodies of size, survivors of human trafficking and organized abuse, and others often overlooked and harmed in clinical settings.

Theory of Change

Inner Justice Works uses a multisystemic, holistic, integrative care model to address the clinical effects of trauma and mental health challenges amongst marginalized and oppressed people, and also to improve access to care that is clinically robust, culturally appropriate, and honoring of each person’s unique identity within their community and world. 

To achieve this outcome, we offer social work services at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels, enabling us to support oppressed survivors while also affecting changes to society and our world that reduce the overall exposure of community members to trauma, violence, and harm at the structural level. 

We aim to offer care to survivors — to improve access to healing services that are high quality and culturally responsive; while also impacting the systems contributing to disproportionate rates of trauma exposure amongst oppressed and marginalized communities.  

Our aim is to both: serve our individual clients with the highest quality care, and to empower the folks we support to participate more fully in their communities, in service of a more just world for everyone. 

What We Do:

Direct Client Services:

• clinical psychotherapy services for adults, families, relationships, and youth
• Free assessments, letters, and care navigation for gender-affirming care
• Therapeutic treatment groups 
• Facilitated and structured peer support groups
• Ancillary services (case management, peer support, gender care navigation, advocacy services)

Community Engagement

• Serving on task forces and representing the communities we serve at meetings and events for change-making, research, and policy development. Our current taskforce commitments as of 2025 are to the Michigan Anti-Human Trafficking Taskforce and the Michigan Statewide Violence and Incarceration Prevention Learning Community. We also strive to attend the monthly gatherings of Building Coordinated Crisis Response, hosted by Interrupting Criminalization.
• Offering sliding-scale community events and support groups for collective healing and learning experiences
  • Past events have included a group on the transgender day of remembrance, informational sessions about health insurance, and virtual Know Your Rights sessions

Clinical Consultation

• For cisgender therapists working with trans/nonbinary/gender-expansive clients
• For clinicians needing support with assessment, letter-writing, or care advocacy / navigation for clients seeking gender-affirming care
• For white and otherwise racially-privileged clinicians serving People of the Global Majority/racially oppressed/BIPOC clients
• For clinicians learning to work with structural dissociation and other presentations of severe trauma response