our mission

a letter from our founder

When I first dreamed up Sprout, I was sitting in a crowded meeting room at the job I’d held for years after earning my Master’s degree. I remember feeling overworked, burnt out, and frustrated — unable to give my clients the care I knew they deserved. Like many therapists, I was juggling long hours, high caseloads, low pay, and minimal time off. It was exhausting, and it left little room for my own well-being — or for truly responsive, community-centered care.

I met incredible colleagues during that time — brave, resilient people with transformative visions for community care — but we were all working in systems that made it nearly impossible to practice in ways we knew could help. In that meeting, I doodled a small leaf in my notes and thought, “Sprout would be such a great name for a therapy clinic.”

From the beginning, Sprout has grown out of lived experience. As a queer-founded, and now queer-led practice, our work is guided by firsthand understanding of marginalization, identity-based harm, and the impact of systems that often fail to see the whole person. While we welcome clients of all identities, our services are intentionally designed to center LGBTQ+ communities and others navigating intersecting forms of oppression, as a foundation for how care is delivered.

I’ll be honest: my first goal for Sprout was personal. I wanted to create a place where therapists could do their best work without sacrificing their health — where we could provide excellent care, maintain balance, and still have energy for advocacy, relationship-building, and showing up fully for the communities we serve. I wanted clients to know I was not only sitting with them, but also standing up for them.

In 2017, I came across the term “boutique mental health” — practices designed to offer consistent, high-quality care in comfortable, modern settings. While I valued the focus on long-term relationships and personalized attention, I noticed these practices often served only low-acuity, highly resourced clients. I wanted to take the best parts of that model and intentionally expand it — bringing high-quality, affirming care to communities that have historically been excluded or underserved by traditional mental health systems.

If you’ve come to us after experiences in the mental health system, you may have met burnt-out clinicians, faced high turnover, or struggled to feel truly seen — especially if your identity, relationships, or lived experience didn’t fit neatly into dominant frameworks of care. My vision for Sprout was to create the opposite: a space where clients have access to engaged, authentic providers who understand the broader social and cultural context of their lives, and who are here for the long run.

Today, that vision shows up in how we practice. We offer excellent, modern therapy alongside coordinated, team-based care when additional support is helpful — including medication management, peer support, and case management. This allows us to address not only emotional wellbeing, but also the real-world and systemic barriers that so often shape mental health outcomes.

Our mission is simple: to offer modern mental health care for everyone — delivering personalized, relationship-centered care in a warm, welcoming environment, with a long-term commitment to growth, dignity, and access. We believe care is strongest when clinicians are supported and able to collaborate, and that when our clinicians thrive, our clients flourish. That’s why we prioritize a healthy, supportive workplace culture alongside thoughtful, coordinated care that reflects the realities of the communities we serve.

Thank you for being part of this journey with us. Together, we’re creating a kind of therapy that feels good for everyone — in the room and beyond it.