our mission

a letter from our founder

When I first dreamed up the idea for Sprout, I was sitting in a busy meeting room at the community mental health job that I had worked for years after graduating with my masters. I remember feeling overworked, overburdened, burnt out, and frustrated.

Like many therapists working at mental health agencies, I felt that I could not provide the care that I wanted to. I was exhausted. I was - and I mean this literally - beaten up. I felt that the long hours, huge caseload of highly acute clients, low pay, and little time off created a world where the therapeutic teams were unable to do the work they so wanted to do with their clients, let alone care for their selves. During this time, I met amazing people - with beautiful ideas, incredible bravery and resilience, strong work ethics, and transformative ideologies around community care and support - who were unable to practice what they believe works in the mental health field due to the system they were trying to do the work in. Sitting in that meeting, thinking, I doodled a little leaflet on my notes and remember thinking, “You know, Sprout would be such a great name for a therapy clinic.”

I’ll be completely honest - my first goal with Sprout was self-serving. I wanted to provide a place for myself and my colleagues to work where our team felt mentally and physically able and empowered to do the work they want to do - both inside the therapy room and outside it. I wanted to have a personal life. I wanted to give myself and my peers the time I needed for my self care and mental health work - something that I was always recommending to my clients. I wanted to be mentally and emotionally able to participate in the advocacy work that I care so deeply about while continuing to be able to provide good care to my clients. I wanted to be able to be honest about my politics in the therapy room, to give my clients a sense of safety in knowing that I am not only sitting with them, but that I am fighting for them.

When I began Sprout in 2017, I learned a term - “boutique mental health” - that some use to describe a private practice that serves lower acuity cases, typically clients higher on the socio-economic spectrum that have private insurance or can private pay. Part of this model sat well with me - I wanted to create a therapy clinic that could provide consistent care to their clients, where skilled therapists have meaningful and long term relationships with their clients, in a comfortable and modern setting, with small enough caseloads that they can truly focus on YOU and your needs for the time they are with you.

The part that didn’t sit well with me was the unspoken goal of private practices like these - to serve privileged populations.

Let’s be real - if you came here, as many do, with prior experiences working with therapists in larger agency settings, let me guess what you experienced: burnt out clinicians with huge caseloads, high therapist turnover, infrequent sessions, florescent lighting, and an institutionalized space. You might have not known much about your therapist prior to meeting them and may have struggled to feel safe enough to be truly yourself in a setting where you don’t know what values your therapist might have.

As a white, cisgender, straight-passing queer lady, I saw an opportunity to use my privilege, education, and experience to create a practice that takes the good things from “boutique mental health” and applies to towards the populations who really need it.

Our mission here at Sprout Therapy PDX is to provide quality community care - a model of long term support for the clients who need it most with fantastic, authentic, and warm clinicians who hold small caseloads so they can be present with you and your needs. We take pride in hiring therapists that I trust to live the values of our organization, provide great care, and who are able to strike a balance between work, personal life, and their own personal advocacy.

I believe the personal is political, who we show up as in the therapy room with our clients is political. Being a supervisor is political. Being an employer is political. And most of all, for Sprout - our agency is political.

Thank you for being here with us as we create a therapy world we feel good about.

Emelie A. Douglas, MA, LPC
info@sprouttherapypdx.com
503.209.0914