You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step. —Martin Luther King Jr.

Small Steps Child Counseling values the sanctity and dignity of human relationships above all else. Our hearts are heavy with the recent and ongoing events of racial discrimination, violence, and genocide across our country and in our state.

Here we share our thoughts, commitments, values, and hopes for the future with our community. As both an agency and a community provider, Small Steps fully commits to honoring and protecting others' experiences, needs, feelings, and values around the trauma of systemic oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma.

This commitment extends to all members of the families we serve, as well as our employees, our leadership, our community partners, and our neighbors.

• We stand with our Black community because systemic racism has been allowed to survive too long, and because Black Lives Matter.

• We stand with our Native American community because white privilege has crushed the lives and spirits of too many.

• We stand with our Latinx community because targeting and criminalizing people based on the color of their skin, or the language of their homes, is in and of itself society's most egregious crime.

• We stand with all communities and cultures who are expected to relinquish their languages, cultures, and traditions to embrace the white dominant culture of the United States.

• We stand with the LGBTQ+ community because Love is Love and all people deserve equality.

• We stand with communities who have long endured decades of untenable trauma, toxic stress, gross abuses of power and unbearable pain because every single human being in this society deserves to be loved, valued, empowered and protected.

• We commit to understanding our clients' histories and context through their eyes, and to reducing polarization and dehumanization of people in our society.

OUR PROMISE TO YOU:

Small Steps commits to providing our therapists and staff with ongoing trainings to continue our learning about the diverse cultural experiences of communities we serve in New Mexico. We commit to continuing to facilitate difficult conversations with our therapists and staff that examine our own privilege, biases and blind spots. We commit to continuing to take steps in the direction of ensuring inclusion, facilitating healing, challenging systemic racism, reducing chronic stress in young children and their caregivers, and educating community members in any way that we can on the inter-generational impacts of these essential concerns on children and families. We know that this is not enough. It is a mere beginning, and so we commit to ongoing and expanding engagement toward our above vision for eliminating the traumatic impact of these harms on children, especially people of color. Small Steps commits to outreach, education and empowerment for more families of color to engage in our services through relationship and alliance building. Above all, we commit to continuing our journey as individuals, as professionals and as an organization to not just end the suffering, inequality and destruction of racism, but to stand with all of our clients and communities as anti-racist, and to make anti-racist work our ongoing practice for the repair and restoration of our human family.

We are Small Steps, and we stand with you.