DeAnza Spaulding Sekou (she/her)

Pastor for Congregational Care

Dr. DeAnza is the Pastor of Table Turning and Congregational Care.  She is the founder of  Renew Therapy & Consultation.  Dr. Spaulding is a trauma therapist whose practice centers the mental health services for the BIPOC LGBTQ community with a focus on domestic violence, internalized oppression and intergenerational trauma.  She holds a BS in Sociology from Central Washington University, a MA in Counseling Psychology, from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and a Phd in International Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.  

Dr. DeAnza is a Dissertation Chair and Professor at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, as well as an Adjunct Professor at The Seattle Institute of East Asian Medicine where she teaches courses on race, cultural competency and trauma informed care. 

For nearly a decade, Pastor DeAnza served as the Justice and Compassion Pastor at Quest Church in Seattle, where she founded the Q Cafe, outreach programs for the unhoused called To the Streets and The Bridge Care Center.  She was the director of Quest Community Development which provided resources and a venue space for local, national and international artists and musicians.  

Her research entitled Domestic Violence Disclosure Decisions of Latina Immigrants: A Phenomenological Study led her to become the research lead of the largest longitudinal domestic violence study in King County in partnership with Washington State Coalition for Domestic Violence and Michigan State University.  Dr. Spaulding has traveled to Turkey, China, Peru and Thailand to meet with internally displaced persons who are victims of domestic violence.  In 2015, she became the Fellow for the Center of Multicultural and Diversity Studies and was the research assistant on the disclosure decisions for the LGBTQ at the Bilgi University in Istanbul. 

Dr. DeAnza was inducted into the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Society at Yale Graduate School in 2015.   She has been a member of Valley and Mountain for 7 years.  She served on the Board for 6 years and joined the staff in June of 2022.  Dr. Spaulding is currently working on a book entitled What if I Told You There was Nothing Wrong with You?: Racism and the Stigma of Mental Health.