For nearly a decade, the Institute for Ashé Movement (IAM) has provided culturally resonant and affirming mental health, community wellness, education, and support services, and healing arts programs for individuals, partners, families, and groups in the greater New Orleans area.

In New Orleans, communities are greatly impacted by poverty, environmental and institutional trauma, and a severe lack of resources for mental and physical wellness that are accessible and supportive. These issues are greatly magnified by the struggles to fully recover from the grief, displacement, land and wealth theft, and destruction of public education that have occurred since, and resulting from, Hurricane Katrina. The comprehensiveness of this devastation has been exacerbated by mental health services that range from culturally incompetent to culturally antagonistic, pathologizing, and carceral. 

IAM works with/in community to extend healing beyond the clinical and beyond Western paradigms to address systemic and institutional impacts with liberatory, integrative approaches.

IAM exists to dismantle the well-documented barriers that prevent many individuals and communities from accessing healing. Our mission is to provide comprehensive, emancipatory spaces of transformational connection and remembrance that are land-based, culturally rooted, and accessibility for all.