Flourish Turns 10 This month!

Wow, hard to believe but April 2024 marks the ten year anniversary of the formation of our practice! The journey into entrepreneurship and mental health care has been wild, but it's wonderful to reflect on the growth and success that our team has encountered along the way. 

In 2014, I started the practice as a newly licensed LPC experienced with disadvantaged populations with chronic disease, socioeconomic challenges, trauma, and severe mental illness. I had a passion for serving the most needy in our community, but I longed to do it in a calm and peaceful space that had been lacking in years working in nonprofit agencies. I had a vision of creating a group practice that would be a reliable community service, would be easy to access, and would accept insurance. In 2015, my sister Megan Kennedy-Kotalik joined me as a newly graduated LMSW and brought experience with child and family counseling and social work. Megan and I worked out of another counselor's space in far East Dallas, renting the room by the hour for the first couple years.

During that time, I worked to understand the nuances of accepting insurance, the jargon around claims submission and payment, and to establish sustainable business practices that would support the practice to move into our own location. Being a yoga instructor, I sub-leased a tiny office in a yoga studio in North Oak Cliff in 2016, providing services to a this new geographical area along with a new set of clientele from the yoga studio.  Our clients that knew us then fondly remember our little counseling "closet". 

In 2017, my grad school classmate from UNT Rosanna Santiago joined the practice and brought extensive experience working with children as a school counselor.  We remained in the yoga studio until finding a larger space in 2018 in Winnetka Heights in North Oak Cliff and moving there. ​

Also in 2018, my former supervisor and professor, Dr. Yu-Fen Lin joined, bringing knowledge of multicultural counseling, counseling ethics, and counseling education. She brought language skills in Mandarin and Taiwanese and allowed us to reach new populations.  Danielle Adams also joined Flourish in 2018, bringing expertise in populations in crisis, suicide risk, couples counseling, and LGBTQ populations. Later that year we expanded further in the building in Winnetka Heights by renting a few more office spaces and we remained there until 2022 when we finally moved into our current space at 533 W 12th St. Over that time Melissa Fowler joined us as our office manager while she was finishing her masters in counseling. She is now our senior office manager and shortly will be a fully licensed LPC. We also added Ariella Rodriguez, Malarie Kennedy (my other sister, woo-hoo!), Jason Anderson, and Koyt Kifer in recent years. Gracey Sutherland and Jasmine Herrerra-Martinez  are invaluable members of our office management team, both of them seeking long term careers in the helping profession.​

Flourish's client list has grown from just a handful in 2014 to around 300 active clients. Over the last 10 years we have served around 2,400 clients total. We are proud to serve the Dallas area and proud to offer telehealth all over the state of Texas.

Even more than number of years or the number of clients, I find value in reflecting upon our client stories of resilience and success. We can't guarantee that counseling will work for everyone, and it's sometimes very difficult to find a good fit when searching for a therapist. But I can say for sure that all of us counselors at Flourish have seen clients grow and thrive and develop new understanding of themselves over the course of our work with them, and it is so wonderful to witness.  It makes our work rewarding and worthwhile. Seeing our clients flourish makes us proud to be therapists. Here's to another decade to come!