Back in May we opened applications for the Summer Setup Grant with a simple idea behind it. Most private practices get quiet in the summer. Clients travel, college students go home, kids go to camp. We wanted to give a few therapists $2,000 and a reason to treat that quiet as time to build something.

We got more than 850 applications. Therapists wrote about trainings they had been putting off for years, websites sitting half finished, a waitlist they couldn't serve, a teammate they wanted to invest in before fall got busy. Picking five was hard in the way only a good problem can be.

Chris Datiles, Slow Down Therapy (California)

Chris has a small solo practice with a full caseload, most of it built through word of mouth. What he couldn't shake was what happened when OCD showed up. He kept meeting clients with a pattern called moral scrupulosity, where someone is tormented by the fear that they've done something wrong or that they're a bad person, and can't reason their way out of it. He wasn't trained to treat it, so he referred out, and there was almost no one nearby to refer to. Most of those clients ended up seeing two therapists and explaining themselves all over again.

Every summer he told himself he would finally do the training. Every summer the slower schedule made him nervous about money and he spent the time on marketing instead. This year he found an ERP program that fit, kept his July calendar light, and applied. By fall he wants to be the therapist who can say yes to those clients.

Anne Rice, Firefly Wellness Counseling (Georgia)

Anne started Firefly Wellness Counseling in 2017 just outside Atlanta, and it has grown into a team of five with a reputation for play therapy. The play therapist's caseload is full and her referrals never stop, which is wonderful and also the problem. People know Firefly as the play therapy practice. The clinicians who see adults and older teens have more open hours than Anne would like, and a meaningful share of revenue rests on one person.

She has known for months what would fix it. She had an SEO specialist building visibility for the adult side and had to pause the contract when cash got tight. She wants to get certified in Brainspotting so she can offer intensives, which would bring in the kind of revenue that keeps the practice's lower-cost therapy track sustainable. Every dollar kept going to payroll instead. Since so much of the caseload is kids, summer is the one stretch when she has room to work on the practice rather than just in it. The grant lets her finish the website and start the training before fall referrals come in.

Rodney Long Jr., Counseling for Men (Ohio)

Rodney describes his niche as "stuff that's hard to talk about but too important not to." He works with men on the things they carry and rarely say out loud, and he's good at getting in front of people offline. He's done radio, local TV, and expert interviews for the Akron Beacon Journal. He wrote a six-week men's mental fitness course and sold it to a local construction company, then sold it to them again. Online, though, he had close to nothing.

Men seek therapy less often, and Rodney's work is short-term, so he is always refilling the pipeline. He had eight to ten clients a week when he applied, enough to get by and not enough to survive losing a few over the summer. He has tried to launch this practice before and couldn't get it to stick. This time it had momentum. The grant pays for a social media firm to build him a plan he can follow.

CarmenLeah Ascencio, LICSW, MPH (Massachusetts)

CarmenLeah has been a therapist for more than 20 years. Her solo practice in Western Massachusetts mixes trauma therapy and couples work with ecotherapy, grief rituals, and community workshops, and she teaches in Boston University's online MSW program. Her days run back to back from school drop-off to pickup, and then she teaches at night.

The work she loves most, the group and community work, is the work that never fits. Every working hour has to be billable, and building a group or a partnership means hours that don't pay. So the ideas stayed ideas. Her caseload dips every summer when the college students in her town go home, and this year she's using the dip on three of them: writing the curriculum for an ecotherapy running group, building a partnership with a community organization in Holyoke, and finishing the move to an S corp.

Anu Menon, Tamarasa Therapy (North Carolina)

Anu runs a group practice in Durham with four associate-level therapists under her supervision. Two have full caseloads. The two newest are recent graduates still finding their footing, and Anu can see exactly where they are and where they could be.

The problem showed up in the intake queue. Complex trauma cases would come through and there wasn't always a therapist on the team trained to take them, so some clients had to be referred out. Advanced training would close that gap, but the newer therapists weren't yet bringing in the revenue to justify it, and quality trainings mean days away from clients on top of the cost. Every time she looked at it, it felt like a risk the practice couldn't afford yet. Summer is when her team can take continuing education with real attention, before the fall rush. The grant pays for advanced trauma training for both newer therapists and EMDR certification for one of them.

What we heard from 850 therapists

A few things came up in almost every application. The summer dip is real, and for most solo practices it's the only time of year with room to work on the business. Nearly everyone knew exactly what they wanted to build. The thing in the way was cash flow, almost every time.

This grant is the first in a series of programs to fund therapists investing in their practices, and if you applied this round and didn't get one, we hope you'll try again. More are coming.

‍