About RTF
Rainbow Transformations Foundation is a trans-led nonprofit providing trauma-informed coaching, peer support, education, and systems-change work for trans, gender-diverse, and intersex people in Los Angeles County.
Hana Leyland is a queer woman of trans experience, peer support practitioner, and the founder and Executive Director of Rainbow Transformations Foundation. She brings over five years of lived experience across advocacy, treatment systems, coaching, companionship, case management, house management, and business development.
She has personal and extensive experience of substance use, eating disorder, and mental health recovery, and is proud to have remained sober since 2018 — while recognizing that relapse is part of many people's stories, and without judgment for those for whom that is true.
Her work is grounded in lived experience — not as a disclosure, but as a care orientation. She understands, from the inside, what it takes to build trust with trans clients who have learned not to expect it from the systems meant to serve them. She works with clients navigating recovery and transition alongside other forms of life instability — the moments when identity, sobriety, housing, relationships, and survival are all in motion at once.
Her background is deliberately cross-disciplinary. She has supported clients ranging from individuals in early-twenties instability to working professionals, world-touring performers, and high-profile figures navigating treatment alongside public lives.
A note on scope: All services provided directly by RTF — coaching, companionship, case management, navigation, and advocacy — are peer support services. They are non-clinical, grounded in lived experience, and explicitly not licensed clinical treatment or certified SUD services. When clinical or medical needs arise, clients are referred to independently licensed outside providers who operate fully under their own credentials. RTF facilitates referrals and coordinates alongside clinical providers; it does not deliver or take responsibility for licensed clinical work.
Our work is built on a different set of first principles — about identity, power, social conditions, and what care actually requires. Read Our Approach →
Vanessa Warri is a community-based scholar, strategist, and advocate dedicated to advancing the health and wellbeing of Black, Indigenous, and transgender and gender-expansive people of color. She holds an MSW from UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and brings over a decade of direct service and education experience with LGBTQ youth, foster youth, and system-involved individuals — grounded in a deep commitment to addressing the structural inequities that shape those communities' lives.
As a PhD student in Social Welfare at UCLA, Vanessa's research examines the education-health relationship across the lifespan of transgender and gender-expansive people of color — specifically how early educational disruptions, rooted in cisnormative exclusion and school-based violence, create lasting barriers to health and wellbeing into adulthood. Her work applies a life course perspective to understand how upstream social conditions become downstream health outcomes, and she is developing non-medical, education-based interventions that center community over clinic.
Beyond her research, Vanessa is an experienced community-based researcher and consultant, providing strategic support to nonprofits and organizations committed to equity and inclusion. She currently collaborates with the APA Taskforce on Violence Against Educators and the UCLA Hub for Health Intervention, Policy, and Practice (HHIPP), where she works on adapting evidence-based care for transgender women of color in Los Angeles County. She brings to RTF's board a rare combination of lived-community orientation, research rigor, and systems-level strategic thinking.
Sonia Figueroa, Esq. is a sole practitioner at SSFL Law, APC, practicing immigration law exclusively since 2014 — focusing on family immigration, humanitarian relief, and citizenship. She is a member of the LGBTQ+ Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, a US Army veteran, and former USCIS immigration service officer. She received her J.D. from Loyola Law School.
Dr. Patrick Lockwood has worked at every level of the mental health and addiction treatment industry, as well as for non-profits and startups. His background in community interventions began before he graduated from the University of Missouri, where he successfully co-authored a grant creating a virtual intervention to help parents on campus become more connected and develop a support community.
Dr. Lockwood serves RTF in an advisory and board governance capacity. His clinical credentials and licensure are his own and pertain to his independent professional practice — not to services delivered by RTF. RTF does not provide licensed clinical treatment.
Our clinical advisors serve RTF in an advisory capacity only. Their clinical credentials and licensure are their own and pertain to their independent professional practice(s) — not to services delivered by RTF. RTF does not provide licensed clinical treatment.
Jeff Gaddess is a systems architect for vulnerable and underserved communities. With more than three decades of experience redesigning how providers, cities, and counties respond to homelessness, serious mental illness, and structural displacement, he has developed non-congregate housing ecosystems, co-occurring disorder programs, neurodivergent-informed care models, and diversionary pathways that support reintegration from incarceration and long-term hospitalization back into community.
A recognized expert in trauma-informed systems design, Jeff has helped shape organizations, programs, and physical environments to prioritize safety, dignity, and belonging from the ground up. His work consistently produces outcomes that exceed industry benchmarks because it is rooted in human dignity, relational care, and sustainable systems change.
Trained as a depth psychologist and organizational psychologist, Jeff also serves as adjunct faculty, mentoring the next generation of undergraduate and graduate clinicians entering the field. He brings a rare combination of clinical depth, operational fluency, and partnership-building expertise to complex initiatives requiring both visionary design and practical implementation.
Jess Romeo is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and clinical social worker, and the founder of OutPsych — a group practice redefining what psychiatric care can look like. OutPsych specializes in psycho-endocrine care, hormone therapy, and lifespan psychiatry, with particular depth in life transitions including menopause, gender transition, perinatal mental health, and pregnancy.
Jess operates at the intersection of clinical rigor and radical inclusion, guided by a core belief that good psychiatry requires both gold-standard evidence and genuine attunement to the communities medicine has historically overlooked. He is also the founder of My Gender IQ, a continuing education initiative building trans competency across healthcare disciplines.
A sought-after speaker at national health and mental health conferences, Jess brings a dual-trained clinical perspective to conversations about affirming psychiatric practice, chronic illness, and the evolving role of gender in mental and physical health. His work is informed by both professional expertise and lived experience as a queer and trans person — a combination that shapes not just what he practices, but why.
Affiliated with OutCare Health.
Dr. Cadyn Cathers is a genderful transgender man, bisexual, ambiamorous, disabled, neurodivergent, and second-generation Polish American clinician, educator, and founder of Out Couch Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. His work sits at the intersection of mental health practice, community care, and lived experience. He brings an embodied understanding of identity, resilience, and systems navigation to his role as advisor.
Dr. Cadyn is a licensed psychologist specializing in affirmative psychoanalytic psychotherapy with LGBTQIA+ communities. Informed by his identities and lived experience, he approaches care through an intersectional, trauma-informed, and anti-pathologizing lens — centering collaboration, autonomy, and seeing the whole person beyond diagnosis.
Dr. Cadyn designs and delivers continuing education for mental health providers on gender-affirming care, trauma-informed practice, and working effectively with LGBTQ+ communities. His trainings emphasize practical, accountable approaches that move beyond surface-level "affirmation" toward real competency in care delivery. He is known for translating complex clinical and theoretical concepts into grounded, usable frameworks that clinicians can apply in real-world settings.
As an advisor, Dr. Cadyn helps shape ethical, responsive, and adaptable services — particularly for those most marginalized and underserved by traditional systems. He provides guidance on clinical integrity, ethical care delivery, and the development of services that are truly responsive and supportive of communities historically underserved by mainstream care.