Licensed Clinical Providers

Homeword; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 65,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Life After Justice in Chicago seeks a licensed clinician to lead trauma-informed psychotherapy within its Holistic Mental Health and Wellness Empowerment Pilot, serving exonerees and their families.

You will collaborate with peer support staff, leverage lived experience, and help scale a replicable statewide model of care under ICJIA funding.

Active unrestricted Illinois licensure as clinical psychologist, LCSW, LCPC, or LMFT is required; enthusiasm for reentry and justice reform is essential.

Qualifications

• Active unrestricted Illinois licensure as clinical psychologist, LCSW, LCPC, LMFT, or equivalent.
• You are drawn to work at the edge of the field and believe in innovative care for exonerees.
• You will work with peer support staff and contribute to statewide care models.

Responsibilities

• Provide trauma-informed psychotherapy to exonerees and families.
• Deliver resource coaching and family support as part of the holistic pilot.
• Collaborate with peer staff and contribute to a replicable, statewide model of care under ICJIA funding.

Skills

Trauma-informed care

Reentry focus

Advocacy

Peer collaboration

Education

Illinois licensure (clinical psychologist, LCSW, LCPC, LMFT)

Job description

Life After Justice is a national Chicago-based nonprofit founded and led by people who were wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, including Co-Founders Jarrett Adams and Antione Day and Board Chair Terrill Swift. LAJ exists to fill a gap the field left open: people who come home after a wrongful conviction usually can't use standard reentry services, which are built for people who committed the offenses they were convicted of. LAJ's Holistic Mental Health and Wellness Empowerment Pilot, launched in October 2022, provides trauma-informed psychotherapy, resource coaching, and family support to exonerees, with the goal of building a replicable model of care for the trauma of wrongful incarceration. This position is funded through an ICJIA R3 grant that expands the pilot to serve 25 people living in Chicago's Western R3 census tracts, communities hit hard by wrongful convictions tied to the Jon Burge and Ronald Watts cases and by decades of disinvestment.

Why Work For Us?

Life After Justice was founded by Jarrett Adams and Antione Day — not from theory, but from what they lived and what they returned home to. When they were released, there was no system waiting to help them rebuild. No roadmap. No support. Just the weight of everything that had been taken — and the expectation to start over with nothing. They know the gaps because they lived them — and, in many ways, still do. Life After Justice was built in response to that absence. Not to complement existing systems, but to fill what was never there. To create the support, advocacy, and community they needed — and refused to accept did not exist. Today, that vision is carried forward by a board of leaders who have collectively spent 93 years wrongfully incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Nearly a century of stolen time that now shapes every decision we make. We advance this work through data-driven strategic litigation, holistic mental health support, and research rooted in lived experience — because freedom must mean more than survival. Jarrett Adams was wrongfully convicted at 17 and spent nearly a decade incarcerated before his exoneration. He went on to earn his law degree and now represents others in the same systems that once failed him. Antione Day, a social justice leader and exoneree, brings lived experience and community leadership to this work — ensuring it remains grounded in the realities people face long after release. Together, they built Life After Justice as it is meant to be: a gap-filler, a builder, and a community shaped by those who have lived through what the system too often ignores. Because wrongful incarceration does not end when the prison doors open. Its harm follows people home — through trauma, lost time, and systems that still fail to repair what they broke. We exist to change that.

Active unrestricted Illinois licensure as a clinical psychologist, LCSW, LCPC, LMFT, or equivalent.

Who you are

You're drawn to work at the edge of the field. There is no established treatment manual for the trauma of wrongful incarceration. You read that as the opportunity, not the obstacle. You understand that coming home from a wrongful conviction is not the same as reentry, or you want to learn why. The systems built for reentry weren't built for them. The people you'll serve carry the trauma of incarceration plus the injury of innocence, and you're ready to meet both. You're passionate about reentry and believe it deserves innovation, care built around what this population actually needs rather than what existing systems happen to offer. You want your sessions to count twice: once for the person in front of you, and again for the replicable, statewide model of care your work will help build. You treat lived experience as expertise. You're comfortable working alongside peer support staff and an organization founded and led by exonerees, and you bring humility to a population that has every reason to be careful about who it trusts.

Providers will be selected through LAJ's competitive procurement process consistent with ICJIA requirements.