About us

Our philosophy is to embrace the resilience that all families and individuals bring to therapy and create a landscape of liberation in resolving life’s struggles. We do not define our clients by the particular identity of their presenting problems but rather by their multiple and complex identities: their wholeness.

What makes the Institute’s approach so visionary? A Liberation based healing perspective. Our focus is linking people across family and community boundaries to solve common problems. Personal and relational problems are situated in broader social issues to form a healing context.

The change we seek is structural and adaptive in personal life — as well as change that addresses power imbalances. The focus of new and healing strategies is transformative and intergenerational. This is specifically relevant around issues of oppression and oppressor systems.

The change that we strive for is one of global humanity and social justice, embracing acts of kindness, compassion, and civic values of care by giving and receiving simultaneously.

We intend to address the scarcity of mental health services for Spanish-speaking families in New Jersey by providing quality family therapy, individual and couples therapy services for youth and families, regardless of immigration status.

At Progresando en Comunidad, families will benefit from services in Spanish and from the expertise garnered over 20 years of best practices established at the Institute for Family Services. A comprehensive plan for all members of the family will include informing them about matters that impact their lives, creating linkages among all participants towards the goal of building a sustainable community, and sharing essential resources.

This model is designed to bring about social justice and equality between the larger society and Latinx families from different countries and economic situations.

The Institute for Family Services offers an innovative and proven approach to a wide range of couples, family and child-centered problems and youth violence. Our family and community paradigm is garnering attention throughout the country and around the world.

This model of therapeutic intervention provides specific strategies for making pertinent changes in personal and family issues and resisting harmful forces of domination. In directly confronting broader social pressures, such as the loss of community, civic values, the fracturing of family life, gender norms, religious and community norms and the demands of the workplace, family members make a connection between their personal dilemmas and the negative impacts of societal patterns and cultural values.

Services include the expertise of IFS therapists as well as contributions from a diverse clientele composed of individuals (such as dentists, lawyers, corporate executives, sanitation workers, home-makers, physical therapists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and teachers) whose social capital brings significant resources to the IFS community and helps to buffer families against isolation.

IFS is one of the few programs, on a state-wide and nation-wide level, that provides comprehensive, safe, and integrated services to entire families, when presented with complex problems of domestic violence, sexual abuse, addictions, adolescent struggles of resistance presented in the form of eating disorders, hair pulling, self-mutilation and other forms of trauma.

Our philosophy is to embrace the resilience that all families and individuals bring to therapy and create a landscape of liberation in resolving life’s struggles. We do not define our clients by the particular identity of their presenting problems but rather by their multiple and complex identities: their wholeness.

What makes the Institute’s approach so visionary? A Liberation based healing perspective. Our focus is linking people across family and community boundaries to solve common problems. Personal and relational problems are situated in broader social issues to form a healing context.

The change we seek is structural and adaptive in personal life — as well as change that addresses power imbalances. The focus of new and healing strategies is transformative and intergenerational. This is specifically relevant around issues of oppression and oppressor systems.

The change that we strive for is one of global humanity and social justice, embracing acts of kindness, compassion, and civic values of care by giving and receiving simultaneously.