Sabeen Shaiq (she/her)is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She has been in the mental health field since 2005 at a time when there were only a handful of Muslims in the mental health field. She has invested a lot into building structures and spaces for Muslim clinicians since she was licensed in 2012. This project is in line with her desire to build mental health infrastructure for the Muslim community. Her values rooted in justice, liberation, abolition and healing drive all of her work. These values have formed because of her own experiences with relational trauma, intergenerational trauma, racism, xenophobia and feeling like she didn’t fit into any ethnic or religious community growing up. She is committed to supporting her clients and community towards healing. In her personal life, travel has been a core part of her identity and she spent the last two decades working while traveling and living abroad as a digital nomad and humanitarian aid worker. Her role as Phupphi (Aunt) and Ammi (Mother) are the most important roles in her life.

Farhana Sobhan (she/her/ও/সে) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a hybrid private practice based in occupied Ohlone territory in East bay, CA. Farhana’s clinical work is influenced by her intersectional identities and experiences as an immigrant, Bengali, Muslim, feminist, queer, and artist. She works from a systemic, decolonizing, psychodynamic, and relational lens. She weaves together clinical thinking, intuition, and multimodal expressive arts tools to work creatively with clients. Farhana loves to do collaborative art to expand the narrative of art as process, healing, and community building. Farhana is a community organizer with the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA) working to end systemic violence, oppression, and exploitation within and against the South Asian and Global South communities in the Bay area. Through IMMHA, Farhana wants to deepen her roots in the Muslim community and make space for Muslims who often feel on the margins, excluded, or “not enough.”

Sodah Minty (she/her) is a clinical psychologist, a person of color, an immigrant, and an advocate for systemic change and liberation of all oppressed peoples. Sodah identifies as Muslim, uses she/her pronouns, is able bodied, holds privilege as a citizen, and a cis gendered person. Sodah was born and raised in apartheid South Africa and draws upon her heritage of resistance to inform her work in the therapy space. Sodah embraces Liberation Psychology, abolitionist, anti-carceral and relational frameworks in her work with clients.  Sodah believes that health should not be determined by conformity. She believes in the beauty and resilience of the Muslim community and strives to enhance access to healing care for all those in the margins of society. Sodah’s investment in the Inclusive Muslim Mental Health Alliance is founded in a lifetime of feeling othered in her own community and finally finding her Muslim identity with her chosen Muslim community.

Islam Hassanein (pronounced: “iss-lamb”, she/her) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist residing on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people in the Bay Area. She has been working in the mental health field since 2008 with a focus on supporting high acuity youth and their families. Her personal and professional experiences as an Arab and Muslim woman have led her to wanting a space where the mental health and Muslim communities could intersect in a way where all Muslim people experience compassionate, nonjudgmental and culturally humble care. The realities of systematic racism, oppression and discrimination and its impact on mental health informs her work as a therapist, and her therapeutic approach is rooted in social justice values; she believes in the liberation of all oppressed peoples. As a therapist, she utilizes tools from trauma-informed, culturally humble and psychodynamic models. In her free time, Islam enjoys being in nature, cooking, and spending time with her loved ones.