About Gathered Well
Gathered Well is a Black-centered community of connection, collaboration, and collective care.
We begin with Black mental health professionals across the African diaspora. The ones who pour into everyone else all day and rarely have somewhere that pours back. This is that somewhere.
It is a place to know one another, share what we have, rest, create, and care for each other with intention. Professional and spiritual. Grounded and free. All of who we are, in one room.
This is where we start. The vision is wide, and there is room in it for all of us to grow.
Our Purpose, On Purpose
To make space for Black-centered connection, collaboration, and collective care. We begin with the well-being, visibility, and sustainability of Black mental health professionals, and we build outward from there.
Not another networking group. A community. The kind so many of us have needed and not found.
Why we gather
We need to know one another.
Black clinicians need trusted people to share referrals with. We need places to ask the real questions, learn from each other, lift each other’s work, find opportunities, and build with people who understand the racial and cultural weight of what we carry.
From there it grew. Gathered Well is becoming a place where our professional lives and our well-being live together. Some gatherings will be about referrals, consultation, business, and growth. Others will make room for wellness, creativity, ritual, rest, movement, books, food, music, and joy. Many will be both. We are not choosing between being professionals and being whole people. We get to be both.
Who We’re Beginning With
Our first community and gatherings are for Black people working or training in mental health. Therapists and counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, clinical counselors, associates and prelicensed clinicians, students, trainees and interns, school and community mental health workers, substance use and behavioral health professionals, supervisors, educators, consultants, and practice owners.
Some gatherings will also welcome aligned Black healers, doulas, coaches, artists, advocates, and community members, when it fits the heart of the event. Every event page will say who it is for.
A space that gives back
This is built to be reciprocal.
Gathered Well is not a place you only take from. It is a place you help build. Members can share their work, write for the community, point people toward what they offer, and be seen by others who get it. When one of us is lifted, the whole community grows stronger.
We want this to open doors. For Black-owned venues, caterers, makers, bookstores, wellness providers, speakers, and creatives. For your practice, your art, your voice, and your name.
What we believe
We get to be all of who we are.
This work does not have to look the way it always has. We can be clinical when it serves and human always, professional and spiritual, grounded and free. We are decolonizing what care can be, for the people we serve and for ourselves.
Black clinicians deserve care, too.
The people guiding others through the hardest parts of life should not be asked to give endlessly with nothing poured back.
Connection is a resource.
Trusted relationships help us make better referrals, find consultation, reach opportunities, share what we know, and feel less alone.
Black people are not a monolith.
Our community spans the diaspora, with different cultures, identities, abilities, disciplines, and beliefs. Black-centered does not mean the same.
Accessibility is part of care.
We hold financial access, disability access, sensory needs, neurodivergence, location, transportation, professional stage, and the many ways people show up. We share what we can confirm and keep widening the door.
Community care should circulate through the community.
We want this to create opportunities for Black-owned businesses and Black creatives. When sponsorship makes it possible, we use it to pay Black people for their work, never to treat their generosity as endless.
Joy belongs here.
Our gatherings do not have to be built around struggle, urgency, or performance. We can learn, build, rest, celebrate, laugh, and enjoy one another.
Care is something we practice.
Building community means learning to love one another well, with honesty, consent, boundaries, and room for repair. Not everyone will become family, and that is okay. We can care for one another and still honor our own limits.
Help us build itGathered Well is being created with love, intention, and very little else right now.
For now it is organized and funded out of pocket by one associate clinician alongside her other work.
If this is a space you believe in, you can help it grow. Partners and sponsors make our gatherings possible through funding, venues, nourishment, products, and resources. That support goes straight into caring for this community and paying the Black businesses and practitioners who bring it to life.
This is an invitation. Build it with us.
Founded through Beautiful Souls Aligned
Gathered Well was created by Loren (Lola) Alexander, ASW, through Beautiful Souls Aligned. LoLa is a therapist and consultant whose work moves across mental health, culture, creativity, advocacy, accessibility, and community.
Gathered Well grows from a belief she has carried a long time. That Black professionals deserve spaces where they can be fully seen, genuinely connected, and held, without having to translate or defend themselves first.
She is building the space she needed. If you have needed it too, you are welcome here.