Mental Health Clinicians: Community of Practice Launch Event

Kick off a new community for mental health pros to connect, share tips, and support each other in person. Mental health therapists and clinicians are resilient and skilled entrepreneurs, often starting as solopreneurs, with one of the most dependable customer bases around. But capacity limits, burnout, regulations and a demand that outpaces supply make it hard to scale. Meanwhile, insurance rates keep dropping, private equity-backed platforms are changing the rules, and sessions are being capped no matter what clients need. Many of us are exhausted and carrying our own challenges, isolated by a profession that trains us to stay separate, even from each other. The Mental Health Therapist & Clinician Community of Practice at Impact Hub Baltimore is an initiative for licensed clinicians who provide direct services: psychologists, counselors, therapists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and medication management providers. It’s just for us, because what we’re facing is specific to our profession. Come share what you’re seeing, meet your colleagues, and help shape what we build. You don’t have to have answers. You just have to show up. Agenda (2 hours) • Welcome (10 min) • Review of the current state (25 min): A quick look at the regulatory, insurance and private equity shifts affecting our practices, plus time for the room to add what we’re seeing in our own practices. • Peer conversation (35 min): Facilitated small-group discussion on what’s changing in our practices, what we’re doing about it and what we wish we knew. • Break (10 min) • Co-visioning activity (20 min): Discuss what you hope to gain from the community of practice, what topics to tackle, and what priorities to focus on for ourselves and our businesses in future meetings. • Rehabilitative offering (10 min): Take 10 minutes to slow down, honor the weight of what we’ve been holding, and take the opportunity to transmute it, put it down, or release it. Where we’re headed: This launch is the first of monthly gatherings. Over time we’ll work toward: • Staying current together on regulatory and insurance changes • Peer learning, including shared tools, resources and mini-consults, where one clinician brings a real challenge and the group responds from their own experience • A shared referral network so we can fill groups and support each other’s practices • Burnout recovery and community care, because healing in community is part of the work • Collective advocacy, including a future conversation with the insurers and firms shaping our field Hosted by Alexia N. Smith, MS, LCPC-S, founder of The Divine Perseverance, in partnership with Impact Hub Baltimore.