AW Shields is an eco-womanist abolitionist, mental health equity innovator, and healing justice practitioner.
With long experience in the mental health field as a psychotherapist, community organizer, chaplain, and teacher, she founded the Root Cause Collective, a group of Black mental health and wellness professionals working to reimagine health care by building a trauma-responsive, culturally restorative community as a liberative method of mental health care and healing justice in Black communities. Shields has created a framework for mental health care and healing that weaves evidence-based theories, eco-womanist and abolitionist ideology, and ancestral healing modalities to comprehensively address individual and communal healing and wellness.
She also created one of the nation’s first denomination-wide mental health programs for the National Benevolent Association, the health and social service general ministry of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and a spiritually integrated residential mental health treatment program at the Tennyson Center for Children in Denver, where she served as both chaplain to staff and therapist on the clinical team. She has provided mental health services in communities scarred by trauma including Ferguson, Missouri and areas impacted by Hurricane Harvey and Florence. Shields holds graduate degrees from Columbia University’s Union Theological Seminary and the University of Denver.
