Roots Wellness Center

11/21/2025

Thank you to the City of Saint Paul for the Good Neighbor Award! These are challenging times in our communities and we are so proud of the amazing staff who authentically provide culturally rooted, somatic and holistic wellness services. Congratulations to the other businesses and runner ups!!

Nineth Annual Business Awards program recognizes five Saint Paul businesses for their outstanding service to the community.

11/20/2025

Today marks Give to the Max Day, an important opportunity for us to achieve several key goals:

- Update the building in the retail space next door
- Hire a fourth community responder for ARI
- Afford employee health insurance costs in 2026
- Buffer against Medicaid changes
- Maintain current employee benefits while growing our existing programs

Your support can make a significant difference!!! Fiscal sponsorship through Indigenous Roots!!

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

11/18/2025

Roots Wellness Center is on the brink of launching one of the most important initiatives in our organization’s history — a community-rooted Alternative Response to Police program in a small city in Ramsey County. This pilot has the power to transform public safety, reduce harm, and ensure our neighbors are met with compassion, not criminalization. Peace without Police.

We are so close — but we need your help.
Because of county budget constraints, we are short the funding needed to hire our 4th full-time Community Responder, which is essential for running the model safely in pairs and providing reliable response. To fully implement this program, we are seeking $125,000 to cover:

✨ A 4th FTE responder
✨ Living-wage pay + benefits
✨ Responder gear & equipment
✨ Vehicles + insurance
✨ A full month of intensive training
✨ Community engagement sessions across the city
✨ Administrative and program overhead

This investment is not just about staffing — it’s about creating real alternatives to police intervention, reducing unnecessary crises, and building a model of safety that is culturally responsive, trauma-informed, liberatory, and rooted in care rather than punishment.
We have been incredibly blessed to have fiscal sponsorship from Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center, whose leadership, support, and vision have carried us to this point.

We are also deeply grateful to Raj Sethmager and the entire ARI Steering Committee, whose dedication has helped shape this program every step of the way.

If you or someone you know is able to help us reach this goal, please reach out. Your support will quite literally transform what public safety can look like for our families, youth, and neighborhoods. We are grateful for fiscal sponsorship from Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center and for public safety funding from the Pohlad Foundation.

Thank you for believing in this work.
Thank you for believing in us. 💚

11/10/2025

Now Accepting CTSS Referrals! 🌿✨
Roots Wellness Center currently has openings for Children’s Therapeutic Services and Supports (CTSS)!

Our CTSS program provides individualized, trauma-informed support for children experiencing emotional or behavioral challenges. We work closely with families to help kids build coping skills, strengthen relationships, and thrive at home, school, and in their community. 💚

📍 Serving clients in: Ramsey County & Hennepin Counties & surrounding areas
📞 Refer today or reach out to learn more: info@rwc-mn.com
| (612) 289-5656

At RWC, we’re here to support the mental wellness of children and families through compassionate, culturally responsive care!

10/30/2025

This is the moment for foundations and funders to actually step up. I’m tired of the philanthropic industrial complex and the top-down mission drift it enforces, as well as the gatekeeping of who is deserving and who is not. The whole racial and moral superiority complex keeps us sick.

We need to also examine the belief that nonprofit structures are safer in terms of protecting tax dollars. Nonprofits are not inherently better, safer, or more ethical. They’re just as prone to mismanagement, fraud, and collapse, often made worse by disengaged and uninformed boards of directors. It would be funny if it wasn't. The philanthropic industrial complex is real.

Too many people are underreacting. Far too many people do not care because they think it won’t affect them. It started with immigrants. It won't stop with immigrants.

From a founder’s perspective, we need to talk about financial sustainability in our field and the oppressive beliefs baked into the nonprofit industrial complex. We are expected to be grateful for cost-reimbursement contracts that expect Black and Brown community providers to give endless emotional and intellectual labor for nothing. We are expected to survive on razor-thin margins that make it impossible to pay people what they deserve. Now, pauses on payments for services being rendered to the most vulnerable.

DHS looked the other way for years while billions in fraud flowed through the system.

And now, the same agencies that ignored the fraud are punishing everyone, including the organizations doing the real, ethical work — by pausing payments and starving programs that people depend on to survive.

Nonprofits and for-profits are not immune to the pressures of capitalism. We have to bill insurance to pay staff, keep the lights on, and keep food on the table for clients and ourselves — literally and figuratively. Health insurance costs for employees are skyrocketing. The price of food has doubled. Liability insurance has gone up because of the bad actors in our field. And yet, cost-reimbursement contracts provide zero cushion for overhead, turnover, unemployment, or inflation. Medicaid pauses, SNAP being cut, Medicaid cuts, the housing crisis, etc. We still need to make payroll, providers need to survive their own lives, and the community is in dire need of support.

Our staff deserve better. Our communities deserve better. It's not only about you.

The Real trickle-down effect is that the people with the least are always harmed the most. Bad actors — and the system’s failure to hold them accountable — end up punishing everyone. Especially the people relying on services for their health, safety, and survival.

To Foundations and Funders: People’s trauma is getting deeper by the minute. The behavioral-health field — the community-based, culturally rooted, somatic-healing spaces — are the ones holding it all together.

We need help. Not another roundtable or promise of “support someday.” We need actual investment — unrestricted, flexible, and fast. If you mean what you say about equity, community, and healing — act like it.

10/24/2025

Roots Wellness Center has posted the open positions for Community Responder in the Roots Alternative Response Program in Ramsey County! Please apply here:

10/18/2025

10/17/2025

After more than a year of delays, hard conversations, and tireless collaboration, Roots Wellness Center is officially launching an Alternative Response to Police initiative in Ramsey County!

Following our work supporting thousands of unhoused community members and people navigating mental health and substance use challenges along the Green Line, we’re taking the next step — building a community responder team that offers an alternative to police calls that promote public safety and community connection.

Stay tuned — responder positions will be posted soon! 💚

Huge gratitude to our incredible ARI Steering Committee for their vision and persistence. Together with Ramsey County, we’ll begin training the first responders and aim to have boots on the ground by early 2026.

We can achieve public safety without police as the first response, in community, by community — through compassion, connection, and community care. 🌿

10/16/2025

With the funding cuts happening across the state, our programs could really use some extra support. Donations of supplies through these Amazon wishlists would make a big difference, and we’re so grateful for the community’s generosity!

🧒 Children’s Day Treatment Wishlist: https://a.co/haEsvTa
🧠 Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) Wishlist: https://a.co/biLcM1c

10/15/2025

Roots Wellness Center had some spots open up, so we have additional openings for the no-cost 6 CEU training this Friday at the Brookdale Library for a vibrant and lively training, register here!

Please click the link to complete this form.

10/08/2025

Now Accepting ARMHS Referrals! ✨🌿

Roots Wellness Center currently has immediate openings for Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services (ARMHS)!

We provide culturally responsive, community-centered support for adults managing their mental health journey. Our ARMHS workers help clients build daily living skills, access resources, and work toward their personal goals — all with compassion and understanding.

📍 Serving clients in: Ramsey County & surrounding areas
📞 Refer today or reach out to learn more: info@rwc-mn.com or call us at (612) 289-5656

At RWC, we believe no one should navigate mental health alone. Let’s build wellness, together. 💚

10/05/2025

Our FREE, in-person training on Cultural Humility, Healing Trauma, & Provider Wellness at Brookdale Library is now at capacity! 🌿

Thank you to everyone who registered, we’re so excited to gather with you.

This training offers 6 CEUs (BBHT, BOSW, BMFT) and a deep dive into healing-centered, culturally responsive care.

📅 Date: Friday, October 17
🕘 Time: 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM
📍 Location: Brookdale Library

We’re so grateful for the overwhelming interest and all who registered! 💚

If you’d like to be notified about future trainings, visit rwc-mn.com
to stay connected.