Welcome!
as you explore our offerings, we ask you to join us in honoring the complex webs of relationship within which each of us is a tiny node. please join us In reflecting on “all our relations:” our relationship with the soil, with the water and with the air that surrounds us; with the plants and animals and people that form our local communities, With our ancestors and with the coming generations, with our whole planet and the many crises it is facing.
We are white settler colonialists on this patch of earth beside the lake that the Ojibwe called Michi Gami. It is part of the traditional lands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations. Many other Tribes like the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox also called this area home. Located at the intersection of several great waterways, the land naturally became a site of travel and healing. We are still working to learn the rich and complex history of the people that lived in harmony with this land before our European ancestors arrived with practices of exploitation and extraction. We are working to find meaningful ways to repair and restore the relationships our ancestors have so violently disrupted.
Chicago is home to the third largest Urban American Indian community. At their Center here, members of many tribes and nations still practice their heritage, traditions and care for the land and waterways. We seek to work in solidarity with them.
We further wish to acknowledge that much of our personal and civic wealth is extracted from the stolen lives and labor of generation upon generation of enslaved and oppressed persons of African origin, and we commit ourselves to the work of reparations for that murderous theft.
We learned much of what we know about practices of acknowledgement and relational justice from the Just Therapy Team at the Family Center in Wellington, New Zealand. At the center of their work is a commitment to belonging, sacredness and liberation.
A STATEMENT FROM THE CO-DIRECTORS OF EFTC
In our work as family therapists and consultants to community agencies, we have continually witnessed systemic racism. It deprives individuals, families, and whole communities of the education, the family wealth, the access to jobs, and the sense of dignity, safety, and security that is available to anyone who, in the words of James Baldwin, “thinks they are white.”
Race-based deprivation causes life problems that all too easily get labeled as “maladjustment,” or “anxiety,” or “depression,” or some other sort of individual, personal failing. A major focus of our professional lives has been dedicated to shifting the focus from individual pathology to the societal problems that are the cause of so much personal suffering.
We join the many other helping professionals who are now protesting police brutality, mass incarceration, and other societal inequities. We hope to sustain a flame that will burn brightly and open the door for justice. We are committed to doing what we can to further that struggle.
— Jill Freedman & Gene Combs
Here at Evanston Family Therapy Center, we provide workshops, consultation and supervision in narrative therapy for people interested in learning to practice narrative therapy and community work.
Our ongoing programs are taught by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs. We also host guest faculty from time to time. In addition to Michael White and David Epston, we have sponsored Makunu Akinyela, David Denborough, Vicki Dickerson, Jim Duvall, Vanessa Jackson, Bill Madsen, Vikki Reynolds, Cheryl White, and Karen Young in recent years.