Equitable Healing: Protecting Community Therapy Diversity

Mental health

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Los Angeles faces an unprecedented mental health crisis. Historically marginalized communities bear the brunt of this crisis due to minimal access to high-quality, low-fee, culturally-affirming mental health care. These Angelenos often experience financial, geographic and/or cultural barriers to therapy not faced by affluent Angelenos. Rooted in structural inequities, these barriers are primarily due to low insurance reimbursement rates causing therapists to move to out-of-insurance networks while increasing private pay fees. Simultaneously, therapists working in government-funded entities are rapidly leaving the field due to severe burnout. Additionally, many therapists from diverse backgrounds have student loan debt, and cannot afford to remain in community mental health without full-time pay, benefits and a working environments that allows for them to care for their own wellbeing, and that of their families.

This grant will support the cost of promoting two post-graduate, pre-licensed therapists from part-time to full-time, with competitive salary and benefits. Offering an equitable wage and benefits — in addition to qualifying for public service loan forgiveness — will incentivize our diverse team of therapists to remain in community mental health, rather than leave for the private sector.
These therapists will have completed our esteemed one-year clinical training program, which trains our therapists through a culturally-affirmative lens. Training and employing therapists who are culturally aligned with our clients and communities destigmatizes therapy while expediting the process of building trust. Clients who see their culture reflected by their therapist can help them feel empowered to bring their whole selves into therapy, with less fear of being judged or misunderstood. Expanding our more experienced therapists to full-time increases the number of higher-acuity clients we can serve. These therapists are better equipped to work with clients who currently or previously have experienced homelessness, abuse, trafficking or incarceration. For these reasons, retaining our therapists in community mental health is imperative.
By creating a pipeline to employment that prioritizes the needs of the client AND therapist, Open Paths Counseling Center can retain therapists in community mental health and help clients feel more understood in therapy.

At Open Paths, we envision a Los Angeles County where EVERYONE has access to high-quality mental health care — and where therapists can make a difference in their own communities. We work to meet these goals by recruiting and training pre-licensed therapists who are reflective of our communities, and then employing them in a vibrant, supportive work environment where they feel respected and supported. These therapists then provide culturally affirming, trauma-informed psychotherapy to those from historically marginalized communities in LA County.
Many therapists chose Open Paths because they want to work with clients with whom they share backgrounds and experiences. In turn, many clients choose Open Paths in part due to the diversity and expertise of our team.
Keeping therapists within the most underserved communities can help not only support the clients they serve, but slowly begin to transform the all-too-common misconception facing these communities that “therapy is not for us.”

This grant will provide Open Paths our first opportunity to offer full-time, benefited employment to our pre-licensed therapists. Although LA2050 funds will only support this for two of our more than 40 therapists, we hope that it can serve as a pilot for eventually offering this opportunity to more.
Building our capacity will allow us to increase our service delivery by 75%, and remain financially sustainable despite offering free or low-fee services. This increase will in turn allow us to grow our clinical team from 40 to 60 therapists, with at least two-thirds opting to remain at Open Paths for at least three years. If successful, we will triple our operating budget in the next five years — allowing us to serve more clients. We will do this by cultivating multiple forms of revenue that include both earned and contributed income. Examples of earned income include Medi-Cal reimbursements, expanded contracts with partner organizations, and revenue from our two social enterprises.