Comprehensive therapy, support, and educational services on the path from pain to power. 

Our clinical interventions and psychotherapy guide clients to build on their strengths and shape the direction of their own healing and empowerment.

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The Center for Resilience — Cultivating Healing. Empowering Community.
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Community & Partnerships

Healing happens in relationship.

At The Center for Resilience, we believe some of the most meaningful opportunities for healing, growth and transformation happen when people come together—within families and relationships, among peers, through creative and leadership experiences, and within the communities we are part of.

Our community work grows from relationships. We collaborate with individuals, organizations, schools and community partners to create and support opportunities for connection, reflection, leadership, creativity and healing beyond the traditional therapy room.

Sometimes CFR brings clinical knowledge, relationships, resources or funding to an idea already growing within the community. Sometimes we collaborate with partners to create something together. And sometimes an idea grows from within CFR and becomes stronger through collaboration with the knowledge, creativity and leadership of others.

We are especially interested in what becomes possible when people have opportunities not only to receive support, but to recognize and develop their own knowledge, agency and capacity to contribute. For us, healing beyond the therapy room is not about prescribing what that contribution should look like. It is about helping create conditions in which people can discover what matters to them, what they have to offer and what they may want to build, share or change.

The work takes different forms, and we expect it to continue evolving as new relationships, ideas and possibilities emerge.

Participants making posters around an outdoor table beneath umbrellas.

Community in Action

Community-rooted work can take many forms. These are some of the people, relationships and collaborations currently helping us explore what healing beyond the therapy room can look like in practice.

Women's Wellness Retreat

From experiencing healing to creating spaces for others

More than a decade ago, Edriana Roman participated in therapeutic and youth programming in Holyoke, where CFR founder Jessica Prodis first came to know her as her therapist and mentor. Their relationship has continued over the years as Edriana has grown into a community leader and begun pursuing her own path toward becoming a therapist.

In 2026, Edriana brought forward a vision of her own: to create a free healing and restorative retreat for women affected by trauma, mothers experiencing emotional burnout, young women from underserved communities, women healing from unhealthy or abusive relationships, and others seeking opportunities for restoration, connection and personal growth.

The vision and leadership for the retreat belonged to Edriana.

CFR's role was different. Jessica and CFR were able to step into a supporting role—helping Edriana develop and bring her vision to life while honoring the knowledge she brought from her own lived experience, her relationships within the community and the kind of space she wanted to create for other women.

The resulting Women's Wellness Retreat brought women together for a weekend of trauma-informed group experiences, yoga and mindfulness, body-based wellness practices, time in nature, shared meals, self-reflection, rest and connection.

CFR sponsored and helped co-facilitate the retreat, with financial support made possible in part through the Shannon Community Safety Initiative, a long-standing supporter of CFR's community and youth work.

For us, the retreat represents something larger than a single event.

It reflects a possibility that has shaped CFR's work for many years: that what begins within a therapeutic relationship can move outward. Greater understanding can support agency. Agency can become connection and participation. And, when meaningful to someone, those experiences can develop into leadership and the creation of new opportunities for healing within their own communities.

In many ways, this retreat represented a passing of the baton—from creating therapeutic and leadership spaces for young people like Edriana years ago to standing beside her as she created and led a healing space grounded in her own vision, experience and emerging professional identity.

That is one of the possibilities we hope to continue making room for.

Jessica and Edriana together beside a plant-filled window.

A Developing Community Podcast

Creating a different kind of space for conversation

CFR's relationship with Jose Gonzalez grew from relationships with his family and community that began more than a decade ago. Over those years, Jose has experienced profound loss and change while continuing to grow as a father, husband, community member and leader whose perspective, wisdom and integrity are deeply respected by many.

When CFR received funding through the Shannon Community Safety Initiative to support work focused on young men and the interruption of community violence, Jessica initially approached Jose about the possibility of creating a support group.

Jose had a different idea.

He understood that many of the young men he hoped to reach might never choose to walk into a traditional support group—but they might listen privately to honest conversations that reflected experiences they recognized from their own lives.

He suggested a podcast.

The podcast is dedicated to the life, love and artistry of Jose's brother, Mark “Ase” Diaz, whose spirit, creativity and memory remain an important part of what gives this project meaning.

Jose brought his own lived experience, relationships and perspective to the project, along with knowledge of music and production developed in part through years of making music with Ase.

With financial support made possible through the Shannon Community Safety Initiative, CFR helped create the scaffolding for Jose's idea to develop. Jessica and Jose began recording conversations at Holyoke Media, eventually inviting other young men and leaders from the community to join them.

Looking Back to Understand What Comes Next

The conversations explore how past experiences—including trauma, loss, relationships, mistakes and moments of survival—can continue to shape the choices we make, the ways we respond and the people we are becoming.

But awareness is only part of the conversation.

Jose is interested in what happens once we begin to recognize those influences: what we do with what we understand about ourselves, how our choices and discipline shape what comes next, and how we keep moving toward the people we hope to become even when our struggles make that difficult.

The podcast does not approach these questions from a place of having everything figured out. Jose intentionally brings his own losses, struggles, choices and vulnerabilities into the conversation.

“I'm putting my life and my choices out there so that the person listening can see that they're not alone in this struggle. Everyone has their own. The difference is what they did with it.” — Jose Gonzalez

There is also a question underneath many of these conversations: What keeps us going when giving up would be easier?

Jose doesn't offer a simple answer.

“I still don't know, but I try to try.” — Jose Gonzalez

The goal isn't to present stories of people who have overcome everything. It is to create honest conversations among people who are still becoming—to explore how our past has shaped us without assuming it has to determine what happens next, and perhaps to offer some encouragement to the person listening who is struggling, discouraged or wondering whether continuing to try is worth it.

An Idea Still Growing

The project is still evolving, and that is part of what makes it meaningful to us.

It began not with CFR deciding what a community needed, but by asking someone with relationships, knowledge and lived experience what he believed might actually reach the people he cared about—and then helping create the conditions for his idea to grow.

For CFR, this is another expression of what being rooted in community can mean: relationships developing over time, clinical and community knowledge informing one another, resources becoming accessible to emerging leaders, and new possibilities taking shape in ways we could not have designed alone.

Jose outside Holyoke Media.
A podcast conversation being recorded in the studio.
Jose and Ace together; expression-adjusted version of the original portrait.

Therapy in Community

Bringing clinical care into relationship with an established community

CFR's partnership with Pa'lante Transformative Justice grew from a long-standing relationship and deep respect for the work Pa'lante has built with young people in Holyoke.

Pa'lante has spent many years creating spaces in which young people are not simply participants in programming, but leaders whose knowledge, experiences and voices help shape the work itself. When the opportunity emerged to collaborate with Pa'lante in bringing a therapist directly into the Pa'lante community, the possibility felt deeply aligned with CFR's understanding of how healing can happen.

Today, Kim Gonzalez, MHC, a CFR clinician based full-time at Pa'lante, provides individual and group therapy and support to young people, families and others connected to the Pa'lante community.

Her presence there creates opportunities for clinical care to exist in closer relationship with a community people already know—rather than assuming that accessing therapy must always mean finding one's way into a separate clinical setting.

Just as importantly, the partnership allows clinical knowledge and community knowledge to inform one another. Kim brings her experience as a therapist while working within a space shaped by relationships, history, lived experience, youth leadership and practices that Pa'lante has developed over many years.

For CFR, this partnership represents another possibility for community-rooted therapy: not recreating what already exists, but bringing clinical resources into relationship with the knowledge, trust, leadership and healing practices communities have already built.

People gathered in the Pa’lante community space.

Alianza / Youth Leadership Legacy

Continue to Community Partners

Where We Came From

The Alianza Project & Youth Leadership Squad

Some of the ideas that shape CFR today were first discovered alongside young people.

Years before CFR became the group practice it is today, a group of young people in Holyoke helped shape an understanding of healing that continues to influence our work.

Through The Alianza Project and the Youth Leadership Squad (YLS), young people were not just participants—they were leaders, teachers, creators and change-makers. Together we explored how healing can move from individual relationships into community, and from community into contribution.

“We weren’t just in the program. We built it.”

A Framework That Emerged Together

1. Relationship

One-to-one therapeutic relationships offered a foundation of trust, safety and understanding. In those spaces, young people had opportunities to be witnessed, connected, reflected and impactful—while developing greater agency and authorship over their own lives.

2. Community

Therapists curated groups and experiences so that young people could connect in spaces with shared depth, reverence and a deep understanding of what a safe space container meant—and why it was essential for everyone.

Within these groups, young people built relationships, explored identity, supported one another and created educational materials and projects together.

3. Contribution

The group brought their learning, creativity and voice into the larger community. They designed and facilitated workshops, created the “Trauma Tips” video series, and led Social Emotional Learning classes in schools.

They also designed and attended many retreats and excursions—hikes, beaches, cookouts in far away places and weekend retreats in the woods. In these experiences, they lived possibility, built connection and experienced themselves as a group in the larger world. Those experiences created opportunities for young people to see themselves, their peers and their community in a broader light—and to imagine possibilities that may previously have felt unavailable to them.

Across all three, the experience at the heart of our work stayed the same:

being witnessed • being connected • being reflected • experiencing ourselves as impactful

What Young People Taught Us

People cannot be understood solely through the places where they struggle. When people are given opportunities to experience themselves differently—and to have those emerging parts of themselves witnessed and reflected—new possibilities become imaginable.

Alianza and YLS eventually came to an end as formal programs, but the ideas that emerged through those relationships did not. They became part of the foundation from which The Center for Resilience continues to grow.

Alianza & YLS: A Glimpse Into Our Journey

Scroll through photos from retreats, workshops, creative projects and community moments.

These photos represent moments in time and the many young people, families, educators and community members who helped bring this work to life.

A community group gathered on steps outside a stone building.
A community group gathered on steps outside a stone building.
Participants making posters around an outdoor table beneath umbrellas.
Participants making posters around an outdoor table beneath umbrellas.
A group gathered on a trail overlooking a reservoir.
A group gathered on a trail overlooking a reservoir.
Friends taking a group selfie on a wooded trail.
Friends taking a group selfie on a wooded trail.
Participants seated beside the mixing desk in a recording studio.
Participants seated beside the mixing desk in a recording studio.
An adult holding a newborn in a home.
An adult holding a newborn in a home.
An adult holding a baby beside a window.
An adult holding a baby beside a window.
A participant listening beside a handwritten workshop poster.
A participant listening beside a handwritten workshop poster.
Three participants sharing a conversation on a couch.
Three participants sharing a conversation on a couch.
Three participants standing together beside a hanging chair.
Three participants standing together beside a hanging chair.
A group gathered on the steps of a wooden porch.
A group gathered on the steps of a wooden porch.
Participants standing together beside a deck in the woods.
Participants standing together beside a deck in the woods.
Participants embracing outdoors beside a wooden arbor.
Participants embracing outdoors beside a wooden arbor.
A group seated together on the grass beneath trees.
A group seated together on the grass beneath trees.
An adult and baby during an indoor gathering.
An adult and baby during an indoor gathering.
A participant smiling for a photo during an indoor gathering.
A participant smiling for a photo during an indoor gathering.
A group gathered on a trail overlooking a reservoir.
A group gathered on a trail overlooking a reservoir.
Participants gathered beside a handwritten workshop poster.
Participants gathered beside a handwritten workshop poster.
Two participants speaking at lecterns on a covered porch.
Two participants speaking at lecterns on a covered porch.
Two people posing together on a lawn after a graduation.
Two people posing together on a lawn after a graduation.
Two people celebrating with a certificate in a gymnasium.
Two people celebrating with a certificate in a gymnasium.
Two participants talking on a couch beside a sunny window.
Two participants talking on a couch beside a sunny window.
A group sharing refreshments around a living-room table.
A group sharing refreshments around a living-room table.
Two participants sharing food at an indoor gathering.
Two participants sharing food at an indoor gathering.
A person standing in front of a white peace pagoda.
A person standing in front of a white peace pagoda.
Three people celebrating with certificates.
Three people celebrating with certificates.
Participants in conversation around a table in a shared room.
Participants in conversation around a table in a shared room.
Two participants displaying their collage artwork.
Two participants displaying their collage artwork.
A participant holding up a colorful collage.
A participant holding up a colorful collage.
A view of the Holyoke canal with the words “I love you Holyoke”.
A view of the Holyoke canal with the words “I love you Holyoke”.
Three people posing for a close-up group selfie.
Three people posing for a close-up group selfie.
Participants drawing a large poster on a sunny deck.
Participants drawing a large poster on a sunny deck.
A group working together around a table in a wooden cabin.
A group working together around a table in a wooden cabin.
A group smiling together inside a wooden cabin.
A group smiling together inside a wooden cabin.
Two participants seated beside microphones in a recording booth.
Two participants seated beside microphones in a recording booth.
A hand-drawn poster titled “Trauma Awareness Project”.
A hand-drawn poster titled “Trauma Awareness Project”.
Two adults and a baby beside a red school bus.
Two adults and a baby beside a red school bus.
Two participants posing together at an indoor gathering.
Two participants posing together at an indoor gathering.
A community group gathered in an office.
A community group gathered in an office.
Four participants standing together behind a Holyoke Health lectern.
Four participants standing together behind a Holyoke Health lectern.
Four participants standing together behind a Holyoke Health lectern.
Four participants standing together behind a Holyoke Health lectern.
A group gathered together beneath flags in an office.
A group gathered together beneath flags in an office.
Participants carrying handmade signs at an outdoor advocacy gathering.
Participants carrying handmade signs at an outdoor advocacy gathering.
Five participants seated together on a couch.
Five participants seated together on a couch.
Five participants sharing a relaxed moment on a couch.
Five participants sharing a relaxed moment on a couch.
Five participants leaning together for a group photo on a couch.
Five participants leaning together for a group photo on a couch.
Three people taking a group selfie at an indoor gathering.
Three people taking a group selfie at an indoor gathering.
Two participants seated together with refreshments and a dog.
Two participants seated together with refreshments and a dog.
A participant standing at a microphone in a recording space.
A participant standing at a microphone in a recording space.
Three participants speaking together in front of a projected presentation.
Three participants speaking together in front of a projected presentation.
Three participants speaking together in front of a projected presentation.
Three participants speaking together in front of a projected presentation.
Two participants in conversation during a presentation.
Two participants in conversation during a presentation.
Two participants smiling together on a deck outdoors.
Two participants smiling together on a deck outdoors.
A group gathered outside a brightly lit venue at night.
A group gathered outside a brightly lit venue at night.
Five participants gathered outdoors beneath the evening sky.
Five participants gathered outdoors beneath the evening sky.
A group seated in a circle around a candlelit table.
A group seated in a circle around a candlelit table.
A participant holding a baby during a gathering in a gymnasium.
A participant holding a baby during a gathering in a gymnasium.

Community Partners

This work grows through relationship.

CFR is grateful to the organizations, schools, funders and community partners who have shared their knowledge, resources, spaces and relationships with us—and who continue to shape what becomes possible through our work together.

We believe meaningful partnership is not simply about what organizations can accomplish together, but about what we can learn from one another and what can become possible when relationships and resources are shared in service of people and communities.

  • Pa'lante Transformative Justice
  • Shannon Community Safety Initiative
  • Holyoke Media
  • Be Vital Wellness

School Consultation

Navigating school-based therapeutic services and supports can often feel overwhelming and confusing. Understanding what you or your child may need, what services may be available, and how to access the appropriate supports can bring up many questions.

At The Center for Resilience, our team includes therapists with extensive experience working within schools. They bring valuable knowledge and guidance to clients seeking help understanding their needs, rights, and available supports within the school setting.

Rooted in our commitment to exceptional therapeutic care and community connection, we help clients and families navigate these questions with greater clarity and confidence.

Not all CFR therapists offer school consultation. If you are seeking this support, please mention it on your initial contact form so we can consider it when exploring a therapist match.

Interested in Collaborating?

Some of the most meaningful work begins with a conversation.

CFR is always interested in connecting with individuals, organizations, schools and community partners who are thinking creatively about healing, connection, leadership and community well-being.

You do not need to have a fully developed program or proposal. Sometimes collaboration begins with an idea, a need someone is noticing, a relationship that could be strengthened or a question about what might become possible if different people and resources were brought together.

CFR may be able to contribute clinical knowledge, organizational support, relationships, infrastructure or other resources to help an idea develop. In other situations, our role may simply be to listen, connect people or explore possibilities together.

We are also interested in conversations with organizations and community spaces that would like to explore bringing therapy or therapeutic support directly into environments where people already have relationships, trust and connection. Our partnership with Pa'lante is one example of what this can look like, but we are interested in discovering other models that may emerge through different communities and relationships.

If you have an idea, a question or a possibility you'd like to explore with us, we'd love to hear from you.

Start a Conversation