Open Door Counseling’s Statement on
Social Justice and Non-Discrimination
Open Door Counseling is committed to the prevention of harassment, inequality, and prejudice in all its many forms. This includes advocating for the protection of transgender, gender non-conforming/gender expansive, and LGBTQ+ clients within our paperwork, our offices, and our staff at Open Door Counseling. We acknowledge the fundamental right of every human being to be treated with respect, dignity, and care, no matter their immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, ability, race, ethnicity, or economic status. We believe all human beings have a right to safety, security, and the right to thrive. We commit to advocating toward equality for all in Tennessee.
Our stance on equality continues: we believe our clients deserve to know about their rights as clients in the therapy room, and their rights to affordable mental health care. If we cannot provide this in a timely manner, we will refer to appropriate providers who can, and have a wide network of likeminded therapists and agencies that we personally vet and refer to.
As such, we believe our staff is deserving of rights as well: Open Door Counseling believes that our clinicians have a right to fair pay, including paid time off and sick/mental health pay, and time off during calendar holidays for religious celebrations of all kinds. This also includes ongoing communication with our own staff about their right for fair compensation and their right to advocate on behalf of themselves for promotion and higher wages. Open dialogue with our skilled clinicians about their value as human beings is critical to our organization’s success.
We celebrate the diversity of our clinicians and their lived experiences. Because we strive to serve the many diverse and multifaceted communities of Nashville and because our clinicians come from a variety of backgrounds, our clinicians are committed to constantly evaluating their own gender, sexual orientation, race/s, ethnicities, class, biases and privilege. Our therapists are encouraged to read Decolonizing Therapy by Jennifer Mullan, PsyD, What It Takes To Heal by Prentis Hemphill, and offered the training “Becoming an Antiracist and Anti-Oppressive Clinician” by Drs. Raquel Martin and Han Ren as part of our ongoing commitment to self-exploration.
Nashville Area History
We recognize that we are providing mental health care on stolen land, land where countless tribes made their way through Nashville, TN on their way to Tahlequah, OK on the Trail of Tears. This land is also where the sale and trade of human beings took place prior to the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction.
In 1852, Rees Whitsitt Porter sold his land north of Pulaski, TN (the birthplace of the KKK), and built a slave market near what is now Charlotte Avenue in the Morris Memorial Building. Over 150 years ago he bought, traded, and sold enslaved people against their will approximately three miles from our current therapy office. Echoes of slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement are felt to this day in Nashville. Often these historical echoes yell loudly in our therapy office.
Our practice is located near the historical sites of:
One of the protest locations of voting rights activist Fannie Mae Dees near Hillsboro Pike
Bicentennial Park, where two black student civil rights activists Kwame Lillard and Matthew Walker fought segregation and attempted to go for a swim at the “whites only” pool at Bicentennial in the summer of 1961. The city of Nashville responded by closing all city pools. The pool at Bicentennial was filled with concrete and never reopened
Fort Negley, located near Nashville’s Edgehill neighborhood, largely built by the labor of black Americans both freed and enslaved during the Civil War…
and countless others.
Read more about Nashville’s long relationship with racial and social justice:
“I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville's Social Justice Sites” edited by Learotha Williams, Jr. and Amie Thurber