COMMUNITY OF WELLNESS
Reimagining Mental Health Care for LGBTQIA+ Youth
HMI’s Community of Wellness removes barriers, builds belonging, and delivers free, long-term, culturally affirming care—because healing should be accessible to all.
Why a Community of Wellness?
The need for free, high-quality mental health care has always been significant for LGBTQIA+ communities—especially for queer and trans youth of color (QTYOC). Yet for many young people, traditional systems of care remain difficult to access, culturally misaligned, or rooted in practices that do more harm than good.
HMI’s Community of Wellness was created in response to these gaps. Rather than offering short-term, fragmented services, we built a long-term, community-based model of care—one that centers cultural affirmation, minimizes interactions with harmful systems, and supports young people as whole humans, not isolated cases.
Our evidence-informed expansion strategy is designed to scale both access and impact, ensuring that more young people can receive the kind of care that truly supports healing, stability, and growth.
What Makes This Model of Care Different
HMI’s Community of Wellness is grounded in three core principles:
- We build a community of care that serves tens of thousands of youth—virtually and in person—through a growing network of mental health practitioners trained in HMI’s delivery model.
- We invest in in-house services that help young people minimize interactions with oppressive and harmful systems, reducing barriers to care.
- We work to transform mental health systems themselves, using our scale and outcomes to influence federal, state, and local funding priorities toward more inclusive approaches.
Click on the image to view or download our Community of Wellness literature for a more detailed overview.
Mental Health Services That Work
Our 2022 program evaluation provides positive evidence that HMI’s mental health programming is decreasing depression and anxiety levels among young people.
- A statically significant decrease in anxiety and depression are achieved through wrap around programming specifically targeting LGBTQIA+ youth of color.
- We are the only organization providing and demonstrating impact for this demographic.
- The number of hours required to achieve the decrease in anxiety and depression would take years to access in traditional health care models.
Addressing the Growing Need for Wellness Services
In recent years, we have significantly expanded our counseling team to meet the growing demand for care. Even with this growth, the number of young people seeking support continues to rise.
We are actively building a dynamic network of service providers across youth-serving organizations and advocating with funders for a more expansive, community-based understanding of mental health care.
Scaling a New Model of Care
Improved Space Utilization
Providing services in a community setting that centers the youth and that can accommodate growth to better serve a broad age range.
