StateCHANGE

Every day seems to bring another headline with alarming statistics about mental health in our country, and none of us is immune to what that data actually represents in our daily lives. As licensed therapists and neuroscience educators, we have spent our careers doing our part to change these trends; however, fatal flaws in our current treatment system were laid bare during COVID, including:

• Quality care is hard to find - The mental health workforce is critically undersized and under-resourced;   training & licensing requirements are time-consuming and expensive, resulting in a shortage of providers whose caseloads cause burn-out and compromise quality of care.
   

• Treatment is expensive - Access to the care that does exist is prohibitively expensive for some, and financially burdensome for most, making treatment a commodity and raising the threshold for subsidized services.
   

• A disconnect between the science and its implementation - Successful solutions are languishing in research papers and therapists' offices, while existing products have the market audience but not the necessary expertise to address the issue in a universal way.

Co-founders Shauna Hill, LICSW (Partner & CEO) and Nicole Hapeman, MA/EdS (Partner & CPO) are subject-matter experts in trauma, applied neuroscience, youth & family mental health, and curriculum design. In 2017, they also codified their Universal Accelerated Resilience Model (UARM) - a proprietary pedagogical framework that combines cutting-edge neuroscience and decades of behavioral health research with implementation science and principles of universal design. The UARM is effectively a teaching model designed to optimize rapid absorption of the content being taught, result in tactical skills that can be implemented immediately, and work for any sized audience. StateCHANGE was founded to combine this expertise and the UARM with the technology infrastructure needed to scale the success they were seeing in their private practices into a viable business model capable of greater impact.

Since founding StateCHANGE in 2021, we launched The StateCHANGE Podcast - which starts with the story of Shauna’s own recovery from a traumatic brain injury, before sharing conversations with others who have faced extraordinary adversity, trauma, loss, or emotional struggle and found their way through. And in 2023, we welcomed Kate Saraceno (Partner & COO), who, in addition to being a long-time friend, brought a wealth of corporate organizational and marketing experience to the leadership team. With our team in place and our podcast creating a buzz, we are now looking for support to get our first digital learning product - Thrive@Work - to market.

Given widespread dissatisfaction with how mental health is handled in the workplace, Thrive@Work is a suite of e-learning modules designed to equip every employee with tools to effectively address mental health in a work-appropriate way; role-specific content also provides targeted skills for those with supervisory, public-facing, and/or executive-level responsibilities within an organization. Designed to be implemented at the enterprise level, customers will be charged based on the number of employees taking each course, and will receive 90-day access to the e-learning platform as well as supporting collateral to use for reference later. Once created, Thrive@Work becomes an asset that can be sold over and over to businesses of any size, and updated or adapted with minimal overhead, allowing for rapid growth of the customer base. Feedback from existing customers will also provide valuable input for developing additional content offerings to expand those existing relationships into repeat customers.

And although workplace mental health may be the focus of our first product, StateCHANGE’s mission is to  ultimately become a hub for resilience in all areas of life. By creating media that engages and educates customers, compiling a library of content that can be used in a variety of settings (corporate, healthcare, education, community, etc.), and by cultivating a client base committed to addressing the mental health moment we are in, we believe we can CHANGE the STATE of mental health in our country. We hope you do too! Showing your support by contributing to our fundraising campaign will help get these resources out to people who desperately need them, and will earn the unending gratitude of a team eager to make a difference.