AW Shields is an eco-womanist abolitionist, trauma-informed wellness equity innovator, and healing justice practitioner. With 12 years of experience in the mental health field, she leaned into her experience as a psychotherapist, community organizer, chaplain, and graduate adjunct faculty member, to found the Root Cause Collective, a collective of Black mental health and wellness professionals working to revolutionize health care by building trauma-informed, culturally restorative community as a liberative method of mental health care and healing justice in communities of the Black Diaspora. 

AW Shields believes communal trauma requires communal treatment, and that an individual’s mental health is deeply interconnected with communal and environmental health. Pulling from all her educational experiences—a Master of Divinity from Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a Master of Social Work from the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work and a certificate in Marriage and Family Therapy from the Denver Family Institute, she’s created a framework for mental health care and wellness that amplifies the ancestral art of community building within Black communities for the sake of mental health recovery and healing that comprehensively addresses individual and communal mental health and wellbeing at the same time.  

She has been called upon to respond to a number of crises across the country to offer psychological, spiritual and emotional support for community leaders involved, including but not limited to, the Ferguson Uprising of 2014, the Charlotte Uprising of 2016, Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and Hurricane Florence in 2018. She also created one of the nation’s first denomination-wide mental health programs as the Mental Health Initiative Manager of the National Benevolent Association (NBA), the health and social service general ministry of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ and one of the nation's first spiritually-integrated residential mental health treatment programs at the Tennyson Center for Children in Denver, Colorado, where she served as both chaplain to staff and therapist on the clinical team. In 2014, AW was recruited by the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work to design and teach their first graduate Spirituality and Social Work course. She continues to guest lecture and offers multiple training workshops within the mental health field on spiritually integrated and anti-oppressive cultural competence and social work praxis.