Since 2024, The Care Collective’s practitioners have been providing pay-what-you-will psychotherapy services, and we are actively accepting new clients!
We provide outpatient therapy via telehealth. Participants will need a device capable of streaming video and audio and a strong internet connection to join sessions. It is important to find a private place to join sessions, but that can be anywhere that is comfortable for you. At this time, all participants must be in the state of Virginia during their sessions.
The first session consists of an intake, an hour long interview with the therapist where you share background information and the issues that are bringing you to therapy. Together, you and your therapist will develop goals and a plan for what your time in therapy will look like.
In many other therapy clinics that utilize insurance for payment, this intake must lead to a diagnosis in order for treatment to be covered. While our therapist is qualified to make mental health diagnoses and will do so when wanted by participants, this is not a requirement of our therapy clinic.
After intake, you and your therapist will figure out what you want therapy to look like, and this can be very different for different people. You might want to meet weekly and do intensive trauma therapy, or you may want a once-a-month check-in, or anything in between. Sessions will last between half an hour to an hour, depending on your preference.
Our therapist is a person-centered therapist with a strong background in complex trauma, having received a certificate in Disaster Relief and Collective Trauma during their graduate studies and training in Brainspotting, a somatic trauma-processing modality.
To request a consultation, please email thecarecollectiveofswva@gmail.com
Your therapy through The Care Collective is pay what you will: this means that no one will be turned away for their inability to pay, and that we do not want anyone to struggle because they are choosing to prioritize their mental health.
Our financial model rests on the idea that we take care of each other – we expect that everyone in our community will care for others in their own ways as they are able.
It is very difficult in the current healthcare landscape to determine the true “value” of any service. If someone is dying, wouldn’t we pay any price to care for them? Yet by this logic, so often preventative or maintenance-based care is put on the back burner, exacerbating what will later become urgent situations.
Currently, the market rate for 1 hour of psychotherapy is somewhere around $130. This is what private pay providers and many insurance companies expect. However, for a huge segment of the population, this is absolutely out of reach. How many of us could benefit from weekly therapy but couldn’t dream of affording an additional $480 in bills each month?
Our clinic currently compensates our provider at a rate of $60/hr for providing therapy services to our community. This is less than half of the market rate for therapy, but still exceeds the payment most therapists receive when working in community mental health. We encourage everyone participating in therapy to pay what makes sense for them, keeping these numbers in mind. If you find that paying $60 or more per session is doable for you, please do so, knowing that this helps sustain our clinic and provide care to as much of the community as possible! If that feels out of reach, know that any payment helps us to continue this work. Participants are able to become monthly donors to the Care Collective via our Stripe account if they prefer that to paying per session.
Frequently, pay-what-you-can services are not used as much as they are wanted, as participants can feel a sense of guilt or anxiety about taking something without feeling like they are paying “enough.” This line of thinking doesn’t hold up for us! Our purpose as the Care Collective is to create systems of care that build strong communities and relationships, and providing services allows us to fulfill that purpose. We believe in mutual aid and radical reciprocity, and deeply believe that providing care improves our community for everyone, including practitioners. It’s important to us to pay our practitioners fairly, but we also do significant fundraising work to make sure that is possible regardless of payments from individual participants. In writing grants and seeking donations, it is actually helpful to show that community members are using our services, so even when participants are not paying for their care, they are helping us to raise the funds to continue it!
Care Collective of SWVA 