By Rosanny Crumpton
TruSolace is a counseling and wellness center that focuses on supporting girls and women of color across various dimensions of wellness, and their mission is to create a safe space for them that provides tools, education, healing, and hope. The center offers individual and group therapy through its association with licensed therapists. Their work encourages girls and women of color to live their full potential.
Located in Charlotte’s Beatties Ford Road corridor on an acre of land, TruSolace offers a variety of programs, many of which are alternative forms of therapy that provide healing techniques and coping mechanisms to participants. While their focus is girls and women and color, TruSolace also supports other groups.
They host a variety of signature programs, including one that supports families. In their Child Parent Relationship Therapy group, parents learn positive ways to interact and discipline their children while the children learn coping and self-regulation skills.
TruSolace celebrated its first anniversary in May 2024; however, the work they have been doing and their mission dates further back. Reneisha Black Ferguson, TruSolace’s Executive Director, was an educator for many years before becoming a licensed therapist. Ticola Ross, TruSolace’s Inaugural board chair, has a community psychology and social work background. Both women have decades of experience working with populations across varying ages and needs, and bring a wealth of expertise to the TruSolace network.
The TruSolace team works to give people access to to the vast world of therapy. Reneisha Black Ferguson explained that she was exposed to therapy in adulthood and understands how that access benefited her and said she wishes she had access to counseling at an earlier age. . Witnessing the positive impact therapy has on the people she supports is gratifying, Ferguson said. Ticola Ross shared that having been introduced to therapy in her undergraduate years, she benefitted from personal growth throughout different seasons of her life.
Some people are exposed to therapy earlier in life, while others later access it later in life – that’s why the TruSolace team , which is why it’s important to the TruSolace team to provide supports to people throughout their lifetime. Giving people exposure to personal and professional healing tools, particularly communities who are traditionally under served, is a passion shared by TruSolace’s leadership.
Standard or typical therapy is often appropriate, but the TruSolace team also believe alternative approaches to therapy are also effective and want the people they serve to have access to those resources also.
“We want them to have access to [alternative approaches to therapy] because the evidence is telling us that those therapies are really beneficial and are able to help people move forward faster in some ways than traditional talk therapy,” said Ross.
Ferguson said she saw a need for young adults to access therapy since the covid epidemic. She noticed the difficulty many people had re-integrating back to school and work, and she felt called to help people navigate the obstacles and stresses that the pandemic caused. Ferguson said this is what led her and her team to create TruSolace, which she defines as the intersection of acceptance, love and peace.
Ferguson and Ross, who are both native Charlotteans, said they are working to fill the gaps in mental health and wellness services that exist in the area. The population they serve starts with five-year-olds, and they serve others, individuals and groups of various ages gorups.
The TruSolace teams use age-appropriate activities and developmental themes that address topics such as self-awareness, self-efficacy, peer pressure, friendships, self-care, self-esteem, goals and more.
The teen group leads a community service project. Last year, the teens collected and wrapped bathrobes for the local unhoused population. They also sponsored 30 elementary aged students at Hornets’ Nest Elementary School.
TruSolace also has an intentional all-women advisory board membership comprised of clinicians with diverse specialty backgrounds, different ages and generations.
TruSolace services are mostly funded through grants and signature fundraising programs, such as their Spring Tea event, Ferguson said. Their first Spring Tea took place earlier this year with a community of women who champion TruSolace’s mission. Among many of those who attended was Charlotte’s Mayor, Vi Lyles.
Visit www.trusolace.org for more information.