There’s a huge disparity between community mental health centers and private practices.

Providers are typically forced to choose between the higher salary afforded by private practices, or choose to work for a mental health center that provides a strong sense of community, a rich culture and solid support system – though it probably isn’t able to pay as much.

Dr. Andrea Hutchinson and John Hutchinson, MBA, the co-founders of CARE Counseling, set out years ago to change all that.

CARE Counseling Cares for Twin Cities Community Members – And Their Team, Too…

Dr. Hutchinson has experienced both sides of mental health practice. She worked for a nonprofit full-time and loved the the strong sense of purpose and meaning that went into everything she did.

“It made it feel really good to go to work, but it was hard to pay my basic bills,” she said. “I could work one and a half days in private practice and bring in almost as much as I was making full-time in my nonprofit role.”

John brought his consulting background to the table and identified there was an opportunity to combine the two models – providing a solid income for clinicians while maintaining a great mission, community connection and sense of purpose.

CARE Counseling opened in January 2014 and Dr. Hutchinson started seeing clients that September. John and Dr. Hutchinson also had a baby that same month. Perhaps that’s where they developed the value of work-hard, play-hard at CARE. In the months leading up to the clinic’s opening, the couple worked several full time jobs to cover the cost of opening a practice and in all of their nights and weekends, they worked on renovating a beautiful Victorian home that became their first clinic location.

When they weren’t working at their jobs, skim coating walls, scraping wallpaper, painting, redoing floors, and changing out electrical – Dr. Hutchinson was working with business and ethics consultants to make sure the clinic had carefully written paperwork for clients, systems that were repeatable, and the company could be in-network with all the insurance panels. John was leveraging his business acumen to create a business model grounded in something meaningful and sustainable. He quickly recognized that many mental health professionals are undervalued, and the companies they work at follow clinicians’ lead and place most of their focus on clients, often at the expense of providers – this leads to extremely high burn-out. John envisioned a practice focused on the provider with the belief that a supported provider will be able to provide the best possible care to their clients.

The team quickly grew to 10 clinicians and Andrea & John identified the organization needed to double down on it’s mission, switching from a contractor based model to an employment model and reinvesting every dollar they made back into the clinicians. Since then, the practice’s growth has been astronomical.

“Our mission is building a community to strengthen the community,” said Dr. Hutchinson. “Every decision we make filters through this lens.” Their mission informs everything from compensation, their response to covid, internal and external communications, team gifting and events, and the incredibly sophisticated training and operation systems developed by Dr. Hutchinson’s team.

John points out the importance of offering great pay, a beautiful environment to work in, and providing opportunities for people to create deep relationships with one another. “There’s an average fifty percent turnover across agencies, and fifty-five to sixty percent of providers leave the profession within five years,” John says. “The people who are consolidating the industry don’t seem to care about the providers. We want to do it differently.”

CARE Counseling not only ensures strong pay for providers to have a good quality of life, but they invest heavily in training.

“A lot of mental health agencies have one or two trainings a year. Some of the best agencies might have twelve. We have twenty-four to thirty grand rounds (trainings), on average, every year for the entire team,” Dr. Hutchinson said. “In addition to this, the team also gets weekly training based on a monthly training topic, bringing the total up to around seventy trainings for our clinicians every year.” A minimum of a fourth of these trainings are focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, meaning the team has about 15-20 hours of internal multicultural counseling training at their fingertips each year.

Each month, they cover a specific training theme, giving CARE’s clinicians the chance to do a deep dive into the research and apply it to their practice. “Our goal is to have the best practitioner-scholars in Minnesota,” Dr. Hutchinson said. The entire leadership team knows that when someone needs mental health support, they deserve to have a provider who is cared for and is highly trained.

Mental Health Services That Meet You Where You’re At – Mentally, Emotionally and Physically

The clinic serves clients across the state using a combination of in-office and telehealth visits. CARE’s current clients range in age from two to eighty seven, and have myriad mental health needs. The clinic especially serves people who may appear be able to keep up with the demands of life seamlessly and perhaps with a smile but underneath the surface, they are feeling the weight of endless worries, hopelessness, sadness, grief, trauma, and/or other mental health concerns.

“We  want to be the first and last touchpoint in mental health,” said John. “We want to keep people from needing higher level of care and support people as they step down from more acute services so they can continue their progress.”

Today, CARE accepts all major Minnesota health insurance companies. It’s also important to CARE that they’re available throughout the state. “We want to make sure that anybody can access our services, no matter whether they’re in the Twin Cities area or rural Minnesota,” said John.