Healing To You

What they do

Healing To You is a nonprofit organization that provides mobile medical and mental health services to adults and children impacted by domestic violence. The organization was founded by licensed marriage and family therapist Cari Teran, whose grandmother Yoshiko arrived in the U.S. from post-war occupied Japan as a young mother enduring abuse with few community resources. Cari dedicates the organization to her.

“Access to mental health was minimal but the stigma of having emotional and substance abuse issues due to trauma was huge,” Cari writes on the Healing To You website. “I hope to bring resources to those who cannot otherwise access them, and remove transportation barriers as we provide mobile medical and mental health services to those who need them to heal.”

Healing To You designed a medical and mental health service model that uses mobile medical vans to deliver services to communities that lack clinics. The mobile medical vans are designed to be parked on residential streets near a shelter or other community resource and not draw attention. Services include mental health counseling, adult and pediatric medical visits, and child developmental screenings.

The organization won its first multimillion-dollar grant from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to serve San Diego, Riverside, and Orange counties, where Healing To You works with 16 domestic violence shelters. Partner shelters help schedule mobile clinic patients, who are picked up at assigned sites. Medical staff provides assistance and mental health therapies, and patients are later transported back to their respective shelters where they are given additional support.

Why we invested

Loan funds from Advance would enable Healing To You to seamlessly continue offering its services by covering expenses as part of a reimbursement grant, including payroll, medical supplies, and monthly payments for two mobile medical vans.