Grace Martin, LMFT is the Founder and President of Grace Therapy and Wellness Center. She established her for-profit practice, Grace Couple and Family Therapy, in 2018 originally as a solo endeavor, and took on her first intern and shortly after, her first therapist, at the start of 2020. Grace is passionate about helping new therapists grow into their own personal style, engaging in lifelong learning, and social justice practices- which all led her down the path of creating a group practice. Due to her continuous immersion in social justice work, Grace began to feel uncomfortable with the idea of owning a practice, desiring instead to foster a community of accountability and shared responsibility and decision-making. This motivated her to create this nonprofit arm of her business in 2021, with the goal of transitioning the whole practice into a nonprofit within the next 7 years.

Grace graduated in 2014 with her Master of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy from The Family Institute at Northwestern University. Soon after, she became an AAMFT Approved Supervisor and has supported over 12 supervisees on their journey through school or to licensure. Grace worked in community mental health at C4 for 5 years post-graduation, doing crisis assessments and therapy for kids with Medicaid. She was a recipient of the NHSC Loan Repayment Program, which was another inspiration for wanting to transition her practice to become a nonprofit- so that her employees can receive loan forgiveness and its life-changing effects the way she did. Alongside her work at C4, Grace also was a part-time therapist in private practice at the Chicago Center for Relationship Counseling, which she credits for teaching her the skills she needed to later open her own business. In addition, Grace worked as an insurance biller for another private practice.

Currently Grace is a PhD student in the Couple and Family Therapy program at Adler University, where she is also pursuing her Sex Therapy Certification. Grace desires to be as highly trained in relational therapies and social justice practices as possible, to be able to provide quality supervision in the field. She also hopes to use her degree to conduct research in her community that can further establish the field of Couple and Family Therapy, which is currently marginalized in the sense that they are just becoming recognized by the federal government as Medicaid providers in 2024, get paid less by insurance companies for using family therapy billing codes, and are unable to provide supervision towards licensure for any other fields of therapy. Grace currently advocates for social justice in the therapy and wellness world through participating on the boards of her own nonprofit as well as the Phoenix Clinic at CCRC, and contributing to the Mental Health Call and Response Task Force of Oak Park.