The Center for Family, Community and Social Justice, Inc. is a not-for-profit educational institution. The primary mission of the Center is to train mental health and human services professionals to support and facilitate the development of children, adolescents and adults within their families and communities.

The Center provides training, psychotherapy, counseling, case management, consultation and research from a perspective which emphasizes the social, economic and cultural realities of people's lives. With a focus on social justice in mental health and human service delivery, our mission is to strengthen resources within families, individuals and communities. The Center’s approach is ecosystemic. We seek to understand and support people within their bio-psycho-social context. Exploration and intervention highlight understanding human struggles and challenges with consideration of the specific importance of socio-economic class, ethnic culture, gender, sexual orientation, and religion for each individual.

Social Justice

The families, couples, and individuals we encounter in our work at the Center face personal and interpersonal issues that arise not just from their biological, psychological, and social development or from their individual choices or family dynamics. The people our teams are working with are exposed to many stressors that have multiple roots in our society’s structural injustices, such as economic exploitation and disparity of wealth, rigid walls between social classes, racism, gender role bias, or homophobia, to name but a few.
The separation of (biological or psychic) inside and (social) outside is an artificial construct intended to make us overlook the power of unjust societal and economic structures that contribute to emotional pain. Injustices inherent in our society’s history and structure and experienced in persistent daily doses are significant factors in human suffering, psychic pain, and physical illness. Context sensitive therapy can not ignore social injustice.
                                                                                         
Social justice, then, in our Center’s name indicates the persistent struggle for

• equal human and civil rights before the law;
• fair economic, educational, and social opportunities as the foundation of liberty;
• dignity and respect for all cultural and racial groups;
• elimination of societal prejudices regarding gender, sexual orientation, and any form of “disability”;
• equal access to health care and social support;
• ongoing critique of the language used in the dominant discourse about health and emotional well being.

                             
Social Justice and Public Service Systems 

          We see psychotherapy as a collaborative relationship governed by compassion and relational justice between the partners of the counseling process.
Compassion alone leads to a paternalistic attitude on the part of the helping professional and the social service systems, in general. Compassion, therefore, tends to perpetuate the very societal conditions that contribute to suffering and psychic pain.
Relational justice in the therapeutic process or social justice in the community surrounding the counseling process needs to be balanced by compassion lest it degenerates into ideology or cruelty.
Often relational justice and compassion need to be restored as integral part of the healing process within a couple or family relationship. Healing occurs when justice and compassion are present and experienced in a person’s life, in her or his relationships, and in the societal contexts of people.

Social Justice, then, as guiding principle in the psychotherapeutic context indicates

• we strive toward compassionate justice in our counseling relationships with  fellow human beings;
• we contribute to just and compassionate structures surrounding individuals and families as the therapeutic process frees people up to become empowered to act in solidarity with others in their community, locally and globally.

The Center for Family, Community and Social Justice, Inc.
166 Bunn Drive, Suite #105
Princeton, NJ 08540
Tel: 609-921-3001   |     Fax: 609-921-2298
admin@cfcsj.net

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