Why our model matters

The Playhouse Collective is not a business in and of itself. It is an organization with each member running their own business. This makes each practitioner their own boss and thus empowered to bring their own unique voice, style and skills to the table. As far as the Playhouse Collective goes, we run in a horizontal manner which means we make decisions together with no official leader. There are founding members who have taken it upon themselves to be on the admin committee. The admin committee maintain the organization but also make decisions as a team.

Each member of the Playhouse Collective is a seasoned psychotherapist with years of experience. Most of us are licensed by the Board of Behavioral Sciences in California or the California Board of Psychology and members who are still earning their license have a supervisor who is licensed by one of these entitites. We hold ourselves to a high level of integrity in our practices and we have bi-weekly meetings where we support one another in case consultation. In this profession, like many professions, there is no benefit to having a boss. As seasoned professionals who are responsible for our own businesses, there is no need for micro-management or to give large percentages of our income to someone else. That means 100% of your session fees go toward supporting your therapist and their small business.

Capitalistic corporations are all too common in the mental health field and we question if the group practice or clinic model makes sense anymore in our current economic and social reality.

Since our profession is women-dominated, historically we as therapists have faced many barriers to fair pay and thus, a quality of life congruent with all our years of education and training. We are told to not expect much for pay and to generously give our emotional labor for free. We are discouraged from bringing the conversation about pay into the conversation about healing. Given the high level of burnout and turnover in our field, we ask ourselves- who does that really serve? Who benefits when client and therapist both miss out on high quality mental healthcare? We believe that capitalistic business structures that leave therapists taking home around 50% (or less!) of what they earn only benefits the people on top. Does that sound familiar? We are experiencing this level of economic inequality on a broad scale across all business and government. Many of our clients are suffering due to these systems of inequality and bring these challenges to our therapy. How can we bring about true healing when we are recreating and suffering under the same exact oppressive systems? At the Playhouse Collective, we envision a better world where we all thrive. It starts with building a more sustainable system for ourselves that inspires us to do our best work with our clients.

Each member of the Playhouse Collective has chosen to be in close colleague-ship with the collective and we have structures in place to promote our ongoing teamwork. We have group consultation meetings every two weeks, we have a group chat where we support each other and we also all get together as friends! This synergy and positive energy is powerful, and we all feel much happier in our work because of it. We also share client family members, siblings, couples, group clients and more since we feel confident in referring to one another. As mentioned in our values, we all are committed to growing and learning in this environment where we are paid fairly. The benefit is felt by our clients who are supported within our collective as well.