While working at New York City's Rikers Island Correctional Facility, we became acutely aware of the obstacles in providing proper mental health treatments to marginalized communities, particularly young people, and how our criminal legal system continually fails to meet people's needs. Due to the neglect and exploitation, many people distrust mental health healthcare professionals for legitimate reasons. We identified a need to provide culturally relevant programming for the people we served, designing the curriculum from the ground up and utilizing music as a means for helping people engage their inner unconscious and address unresolved trauma enmeshed inside the body.

We offer educational programming addressing transgenerational trauma and music-based coping methods to provide a sense of equilibrium in their everyday lives. We offer a non-invasive allied health approach to community music and mental and spiritual health, applying evidence-based methods through a sociocultural analysis to tackle challenges facing the individual and collective psyches. Through a liberation psychology-informed therapeutic music theory, this type of thinking identify and nurtures creative musicality through the community. A healthy musicality in a society nurtures a healthier community and a better understanding of one's inner experiences and reactions to external stimuli. 

We have presented our Liberation Music Therapy at Columbia Univerity Center for Justice Beyond the Bars Initiative annual conference, the Trauma Research Foundation Social Justice Summit, and the Midatlantic Region - American Music Therapy Association Annual Conference, as well as maintain a podcast to get information out. We serve all underrepresented groups, including incarcerated people, targeted neighborhoods, vulnerable communities, and the socially and economically disadvantaged, as well as teachers, students, mental health professionals, and social activists. 

Mederi Muzik is a partnership between DeMarisa Steeley and Dorian Wallace.