About Us

Tricia Clem is the Co-Founder of Paladin Advisers and Executive Director of NAMI Arkansas, the state affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In that role, she leads an interdisciplinary team delivering crisis support, peer education, advocacy, and community programming to the approximately 1.4 million Arkansans living with mental illness and their families. From managing a 24/7 crisis helpline fielding over 100 calls each month to sustaining statewide services through a $150,000 federal funding cut, Tricia's leadership is defined by a refusal to let structural pressure stand between people and the help they need.

Her credentials span both executive leadership and operational craft. A Certified Project Manager and Creative Designer, she brings the discipline, clarity, and execution that translate vision into structure and structure into results. She has served in senior executive roles where mission and performance had to work together under real pressure, and that experience shapes how Paladin approaches every engagement.

Tricia and Co-Founder Dr. Chris Clem have built and led organizations together for years, including co-pastoring at two different churches, a formation in servant leadership and organizational care that runs through everything Paladin does.

Their strengths are genuinely complementary: Chris brings the research foundation, field experience, and organizational science; Tricia brings the operational intelligence, creative vision, and executive leadership that give the work its shape and forward momentum.

At Paladin, Tricia's role is foundational, not peripheral. She is the firm's registered agent and a driving force behind its programs, brand, and client work. Her position leading NAMI Arkansas also means she brings something rare to Paladin's behavioral health practice: she doesn't advise organizations navigating mental health workforce pressures from the outside. She leads one.