Amy Gunter holds a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) and a Masters of Social Work from the University of Southern California. She also earned a Masters degree in Occupational Studies from California State University, Long Beach. In addition, she holds credentials in school social work, child welfare and attendance, and teaching.
Amy is a licensed mental health clinician and also runs a consulting business. Prior to becoming a licensed mental health clinician, Amy was a public school teacher. She still believes some of her best work was in the inner cities serving children and families facing structural and human-created barriers.
“My students had so much innate goodness in them with unlimited potentials. It is not them that makes me fear for our future, but systems that weren’t built for many of us.”
To Amy, education is liberation. Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, made a lasting impression on her. To this day, she uses it as her foundation for constructing knowledge and sharing it. She is especially guided by Freire’s insistence that “No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” She believes that love cannot be separated from justice and that respecting human dignity is a moral imperative.
Her background informs how she approaches the editing process. Amy aims to support writers in using their own unique voices to express themselves. She believes writing is a powerful act in which the writer can be both the healed and the healer.
To Amy, service is an expression of love. Community means that everyone is both a giver and a receiver — a place of mutual respect and a shared commitment to honoring everyone’s voice.
She lived this. She left home at 14. For four years, she was homeless. She worked as a babysitter and cleaned apartments at 14. She started waitressing at 16 and lived off tips paid in cash and checks when they came. She worked to feed and clothe herself. No one handed her anything.
A few months after she turned 18, she signed her first rental agreement and rented her own apartment.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and her first master’s degree in her 20s. A decade later, she earned her doctorate.
Today, Amy teaches other women real skills they can use to move beyond survival.
She is the creator of Beyond Survival coping cards, which were released in June 2026. She built them because nothing like them existed — strategies she could actually use, tools that gave her something to hold onto when she was overwhelmed, and hope when hope was hard to find.
She became a clinician because she needed someone like herself when she was a homeless teenager, battling for survival in systems that did not serve her — systems not built for people like her.
Find Amy at gunter-consulting.com, on Substack at Mind and Meaning: Beyond Survival, on Medium at medium.com/@gunterconsult, and Digitalmehmet Community Blogs
