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Why Window Seat

The philosophy, the plans, and how we'd work together

Why this exists, how wellness planning actually works, and what to expect if you book time with me.

Why "Window Seat"

The moment this whole thing is built around.

Window Seat Collective sits at the intersection of three things that don't usually share a sentence: wellness, travel, and peer-led mental health, seen through a Black queer lens. It's built with Black and queer Black communities at the center, and open to everyone. Culturally fluent care can be hard to find even for someone who's ready to look, and for Black LGBTQ+ young people the gap runs steeper still. A lot of that is stigma: many of us were taught that struggling is weakness, not something you say out loud. The rest is cost, access, and not seeing anyone who looks like you on the other side of the table.

1 in 3Black adults with a mental illness who receive treatmentTap for source
Roughly one in three Black adults living with a mental illness ever receive treatment, well below the broader population.Source: SAMHSA / NAMI.
5%U.S. psychologists who are BlackTap for source
Culturally fluent care is hard to find in part because the field itself is so narrow — roughly 4-5% of U.S. psychologists are Black.Source: Black Health Matters workforce data.
19%Black LGBTQ+ youth reporting a suicide attempt in the past year, over 2x the rate of white peersTap for source
This gap tracks with a wider pattern: LGBTQ+ youth of color consistently report higher rates of suicidal ideation and attempts than their white peers.Figure widely cited; independent source confirmation pending.
44%LGBTQ+ young people who wanted mental health care but couldn't get itTap for source
Wanting care and reaching it are two different things — cost, access, and finding someone who understands your context all stand in the way.Figure widely cited; independent source confirmation pending.

If you've been the friend group's therapist. The family fixer. The one who never gets to fall apart. The one who has read the books, paid for the therapy, and still feels behind on something you can't name. This is for you.

That's the gap this is built to close, and it's not the gap a travel planner or a travel content creator is working on. They're selling a trip. It's also not the same lane as a peer agency that only exists inside four walls during business hours. This is peer support and travel-as-healing built for where people already are: online, at 11pm, looking for an answer. Nearly a third of Gen Z already turns to social media to find mental health information, TikTok most of all. So this meets people there first, then meets them wherever "away" actually means: a flight, a train two stops from home, or their own kitchen table. You cannot heal where you got sick, but "where" doesn't always mean a different country; sometimes it just means a different room, a different block, a different chair. Call it the psychology of place: where you are, even a little differently, does something to your nervous system. You already know how to book a trip. I'm going to teach you how to plan one for your healing.

Wellness should never be expensive. Not for the people who need it most.

Sources: SAMHSA/NAMI on Black adult treatment rates; Black Health Matters on Black representation in the psychology workforce; The Trevor Project 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People; Pew Research Center, 2025, on Gen Z and social media.

Before We Start

What to expect when we work together

What This Is

Peer support, wellness itinerary planning, and life coaching, grounded in lived experience and 11 years of social services leadership. It is not clinical therapy, medical care, or a substitute for a licensed mental health provider. If you're in crisis, this isn't the right resource; please reach out to a crisis line or emergency services instead.

How It Works

Intake first, so I understand what you're navigating. Then a conversation to build rapport before we build anything else. From there, we map your itinerary together, the stops on your journey, matched to your budget and your goals. You stay in the front seat the whole time; I'm here to help you navigate, not to steer for you.

Privacy

What you share in intake and planning conversations stays between us. It is not shared, sold, or used publicly without your explicit permission.

Payment & Turnaround

Pricing and turnaround times: TBA. Full participation terms, cancellation policy, and payment terms will be confirmed in writing before any paid engagement begins.

How This Works

This isn't travel planning. It's a wellness plan that sometimes includes travel.

Most travel planning starts with a destination. This starts with you: what you're navigating, what healing actually looks like, and what kind of plan gets you there. Sometimes that's a flight. Sometimes it's two hours up the coast. Sometimes it's built right where you already live. You cannot heal where you got sick, but "somewhere else" doesn't always mean somewhere far. My reels lean heavily on trips out of town and out of the country because that's the content that travels, but realistically not everyone can get on a flight right now, financially, logistically, or otherwise, and a model built on inclusion has to work for the person who can and the person who can't.

This is where life coaching and travel curation intersect. I'm not booking you a vacation. I'm building a plan the way I was trained to build one: intake first, goals second, logistics last. Think of it less like a clinician handing you a treatment plan, and more like two people mapping out stops on a trip together. You're in the front seat the whole way, I'm just there to help navigate.

You cannot heal where you got sick. The plan just has to fit where you actually are.

For Teams and Organizations, Not Just Individuals

The same instincts, built at the organizational level

Everything above is built for one person at a time. The same instincts also work at the organizational level, because they were built there first. Before Window Seat Collective, I spent 11 years standing up and running programs from the ground: writing two grants totaling $8 million that were both awarded, drafting standard operating procedures and safety plans, building marketing and community engagement outreach, leading staff trainings and presentations, designing workflow processes and quality assurance systems, and managing health information records and reporting requirements. I helped take a program from a blank page to one of New York City's first around-the-clock peer support models.

For companies and organizations, that experience turns into practical consulting: workplace wellness programming that's actually usable, not another unopened email; policy, SOP, and safety plan development; staff training and technical assistance; and program design and quality assurance for teams building something new, including grant-funded initiatives. If your organization needs someone who has built these systems from the inside, not just studied them, that's what this side of the work is for.

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