You Don't Need a Grant to Access Grant Money

A note for group practice owners who've been told "no" because of their for-profit status

Let me tell you something that took me years of community building, a few grant rejections, and a lot of relationship-tending to fully understand:

You don't have to be a nonprofit to access nonprofit funding.

I know. Stay with me.

At Graceful Therapy, we've built partnerships with more than ten nonprofit organizations — churches, school districts, NAMI affiliates, and organizations serving people awaiting trial. We run groups, provide individual therapy, and show up as the clinical backbone for populations that nonprofits are already wrapping their arms around.

And most of the time? We get paid at our full session rate. No insurance write-downs. No grant applications. No compliance reports.

Here's the thing nobody talks about in our profession: nonprofits need us just as much as we might need them. They've already identified the population. They've already built the trust. They've already secured the funding. What they often don't have is the clinical expertise to actually treat the people they're serving.

That's where we come in.

And I want to be clear about something before we go any further: this is not a revenue strategy dressed up in mission language. This is a values decision first.

At Graceful Therapy, we have always believed that mental health care should be accessible to everyone — not just the people who can afford our full private pay rate or who happen to have the right insurance. Nonprofit partnerships are one of the most meaningful ways we've found to actually live that out. They allow us to reach teenagers who would otherwise go without support, people navigating the criminal justice system, students in alternative education programs who have often been failed by every system around them. These are not easy-to-serve populations. They are exactly the populations we got into this work for.

So yes — our clinicians get paid fairly for their expertise. That matters too. A practice that can't sustain itself can't serve anyone. But the reason we pursue these partnerships is because they let us show up in our community in a way that reflects who we actually are. The financial piece is what makes it sustainable. The values are what make it worth doing.

What this looks like in real life

We've run an art therapy group at a school district's alternative education program. We've facilitated free groups for teenagers through NAMI. We have a contract with an organization that serves people awaiting trial — they cover the cost of individual sessions so their clients can access care they couldn't otherwise afford.

None of these came from a grant application with our name on it. They came from relationships.

We show up at community events. We reach out when we hear about an organization serving a population we specialize in. We've sponsored fundraisers and offered our time before we ever made an ask. And over time, our reputation has started doing some of that work for us.

The nonprofit acts as the case manager — they identify the client, provide the referral, and often wrap around our clinical work with additional support services. We get to do what we do best: provide excellent, specialized therapy.

The question I want you to sit with

Who are the people your practice is uniquely equipped to serve?

Not just the people who can find you on Psychology Today and call to schedule. The people who need what you offer and have no pathway to get it — because of cost, because of access, because nobody has built the bridge yet.

Now — is there a nonprofit in your community already trying to reach them?

If you don't know the answer to that second question, that's actually great news. It means there's a conversation waiting to happen. And when you walk into that conversation not as a business looking for a contract, but as a clinician who genuinely cares about the same community they do — everything changes.

This is what I'll be teaching

I'm hosting a virtual lunch and learn for group practice owners who are curious about what this kind of partnership could look like for their practice. We'll talk about how to find the right nonprofit partners, how to make the ask, how to structure agreements that protect your practice, and what the real-world benefits look like beyond the obvious revenue.

Yes, I'll also talk about grant funding — including why we've been denied (for-profit status is real), and why that hasn't stopped us from accessing resources that nonprofits have secured on behalf of shared clients.

This is practical. This is relational. And it's one of the most mission-aligned growth strategies I know — because it isn't really a growth strategy at all. It's a commitment to your community that happens to be good for your practice too.

Join us: Partnering with Nonprofits to Expand Your Reach $10 to attend. Come with your lunch and your questions.

Kate Fish, LMFT, PMH-C is the founder of Graceful Therapy, a 33-clinician group practice in the Chicago suburbs, and Kate Fish Consulting, LLC, where she supports group practice owners in building values-driven, sustainable, and equity-rooted businesses.