Grit is a service-based, community conscious therapeutic, monitoring, matching, and placement program. 

We are the bridge between the idea of volunteering and the actualization of a meaningful, purposeful, and emotionally beneficial volunteering experience. We assist with the activating steps to make it happen, and with monitoring throughout the experience. We provide therapy to assist in processing and integrating the experience and creating meaningful transformation on a deeper and lasting level in people’s lives. We believe that connection and purpose helps keep people sober, less depressed, less anxious, less lonely, and less dysregulated. And the community at large benefits.

We believe a person needs time to focus on themselves and do the work to heal and recover. And we believe there then comes a time that this work needs to be put into the context of others, of community, for it to be truly powerful, impactful, and integrated. We are relational beings. Trauma is relational and systemic. Healing is relational and systemic. 

GRIT is an outpatient therapy program that centers it’s focus on connecting individuals with service therapy projects (volunteer placement). But we are also more than a program, we are a movement from me to we. From codependence to interdependence. We are a way of being. And we want our work of compassion, commitment, mobilization, activation, connection, and service to have reverberating effects into society through the lives we touch and the differences we make, one act, one word, one step, one person at a time.

We have conducted extensive research to understand the mental and physical health benefits of volunteering and being of service, and the nuances of what makes it beneficial (length of time is important as shown by the “volunteer threshold”; “intrinsic motivation” is an important factor and the volunteering being meaningful and beneficial) and what the barriers can be for people making it happen in their lives. 

Our founder, clinical psychologist Dr. Georgina Smith, realized the need for GRIT when over the years she witnessed many clients speak of yearning to volunteer and yet struggling to activate and actually make it happen. Even with guidance, the steps required could feel overwhelming… finding a place to volunteer that matched their interests, facing anxieties around showing up to a strange place, completing certain requirements (a phone call, an application, a TB test, an interview, etc.), following through once they started volunteering, and so on. She would also see similar challenges with treatment centers and programs who would encourage clients to volunteer and yet faced resistance or lack of consistency and follow through. Yet knowing the scientific evidence and growing research that shows mental and physical health benefits from volunteering and being of service, and all the acts associated with this (compassion, connection, gratitude), and seeing the radical shifts and the light go on individuals who did volunteer, Dr. Smith realized there was a need for a bridge, a scaffolding structure of sorts, that could facilitate the process of individuals crossing over into volunteer work, and facilitate and support the steps and follow through involved.