As an Associate Professor at Portland State University for 15 years, she served as the Principal Investigator for many federally-funded grant programs addressing the development and implementation of culturally-specific mental health programs for tribal and Latinx children and families using a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model. She also wished to open her own consulting and training business to address equity issues within mental health services and within organizations and recently took the courageous step to make the switch from academia to self-employment. She is now the Founder and President of Luminosa Psychological Services, LLC and is very excited about this next stage of her professional journey.

Dr. Gil-Kashiwabara founded Luminosa Psychological Services with the goal of providing excellent training, consultation and supervision related to culturally responsive care and equity, diversity and inclusion for providers, teachers, agencies, schools and organizations. As well, she wanted to provide Multicultural Therapy for adolescents and adults, in order to provide a therapeutic process for BIPOC individuals that recognizes and addresses concerns rooted in oppression, racism, and discrimination. Her consultation and training work is adaptable to address the needs of individuals, agencies, businesses, and organizations. She has worked with agencies spanning from local, state, and federal to arts organizations to schools. She has been a speaker/consultant/trainer at the national, regional and local levels. She provides a supportive and compassionate approach to challenge clients to expand and show up differently and more openly in their equity mission. An additional and evolving area of interest is the importance of self-care for those who care for others (especially including workers/providers that engages trauma care). Her awareness of the need for provider self-care led her to obtain her certification as a yoga instructor and she has utilized her training to provide seminars for providers and within organizations to address practical approaches to self-care in the workplace.

She has been engaged in many leadership positions and roles including (but not limited to) co-founding the Diversity Committee of the Oregon Psychological Association (OPA), serving as OPA Past-President and as the Oregon Representative to the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives. Because of her extensive work history related to cultural responsiveness with culturally and linguistically diverse groups, Dr. Gil-Kashiwabara has established herself as a professional leader in her field at both the national and local levels.