history

 The Rafiki Consortium is a human service firm that provides clinical training, consultations and direct service to public and private agencies and the general public. The CEO and primary consultant is W. Henry Gregory, Ph.D.  Rafiki consultants, trainers and partners include his children: Maisha, A. Davis, LCSW-C; Jerrod Lewis, MA; Gillian Gregory, LCSW-C: and Elias Gregory, MA.  As skilled family systems therapists, with a deep faith in human nature, they have provided clinical direction, training and therapeutic services to many of the premier human service agencies in the Baltimore-Washington area for forty years. The Gregory’s supplement the Rafiki staff with a consortium of skilled mental health professionals with whom they have worked over the years. 

Rafiki specializes in teaching and facilitating communication skills and processes, understanding that individuals, families, and communities can solve their own problems when provided with the appropriate tools and support. Rafiki sees its mission as the provision of clinical services and training that promote the healing of negative thought patterns, unhealthy attitudes, destructive behaviors, and sabotaging emotional states that prevent people from working together successfully. Rafiki promotes skill development, attitudes of service and consciousness of social issues as necessary tools of both professional and indigenous helpers. 

Rafiki is known for training professional and paraprofessionals in: (1) effective collaboration with family systems; (2) a competency based approach to interventions, consultations and trainings; (3) skillful integration of culturally competent concepts and practices into service delivery and program development; (4) a set of clinical skills based on ethical and moral concepts; (5) a parallel training process that focuses on both the transferring of skills and the personal development of the trainee and; (6) training in Enriched Structural Family Therapy (ESFT), our empowering model of prevention and intervention.

In addition to training, Rafiki has a history of providing men’s groups in the context of male involvement to early intervention programs. Rafiki provided men’s groups to St. Bernadine’s Head Start Center from 1989 – 1998 and ran the men’s group at Dru Healthy Families in West Baltimore from 2003 – 2004. Since that time Rafiki has sponsored and provided monthly men’s groups (as well as women’s groups, couples groups and couples retreats) for the general public.