Our Story
Our story began as a small team of Person-Centred counsellors who trained together during the Covid-19 pandemic at Southampton City College, where we volunteered as key workers for various charities and mental health services.
Entering the counselling profession is a challenging career that requires personal lived experience as well as empathy and resilience - especially during lockdown - but as we qualified we saw the UK mental health crisis grow worse and worse - with Southampton particularly struggling.
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Frustrated by the number of people stuck on months-long waiting lists (or two years for CAMHS), we heard more and more stories about people desperately seeking support but often struggling to find therapy that was right for them.
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We are proud and deeply supportive of our NHS, which broadly prescribes CBT therapy, but this is not always the best type of counselling for life's struggles, especially depression, trauma and family or relationship issues. We felt that an alternative was needed - and fast.
Building the Project
The Empathy Project launched on 1st April 2024, formed as a Community Interest Company (CIC). A CIC is a non-profit community-owned organisation that functions similarly to a charity, but has more freedom to be financially self-sustaining rather than relying purely on grants and donations.
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Many UK charities have struggled recently to survive in the current economic climate, with less money available to fund services even when the demand for their work - such as counselling - has skyrocketed. We fondly remember It's Your Choice, a young person's counselling charity in the New Forest, that had to close its doors with only a weeks notice after its funding was not renewed. This left hundreds of young people and staff suddenly with no support.
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Our CIC model allows us to ensure that will never happen. We try to keep our operating costs as low as possible whilst charging a reasonable fee for the counselling we provide. As a result, we can offer unlimited counselling sessions with no waiting list - something that no other non-profit or statutory service in Southampton or the Isle of Wight can currently provide.
Improving access to therapy
Mental health and money are fundamentally linked. Often it is people who are struggling financially or from disadvantaged backgrounds that need the most help.
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A core part of The Empathy Project's mission is to reduce barriers to people being able to access high quality therapy that is right for them. Whilst our operating model relies on our service users paying towards the cost of their counselling, we try to find way to make this as minimal as possible.
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One key way we do this is through our Community Fund, where we offer individual counselling sessions to adults and young people at a reduced rate. We run these sessions at a loss to the Project, and use any operating surplus we have to cover the cost.
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Our Community Fund program currently makes up around 40% of all the counselling sessions we deliver, which we are extremely proud of as a team. Many of our Community Fund clients would otherwise not be able to access therapy that was right for them.
Celebrating our first year
We were delighted in our first year to have been able to provide an incredible 1,594 counselling sessions to 480 people. On average, we made first contact with new referrals within just three working days.
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That's 480 fewer patients on NHS waiting lists, or people feeling lost with nowhere else to turn. We've also been able to provide longer-term therapy to those who have needed it, when many local services provide a limit of between six and twelve sessions.
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We've built a fantastic team of counsellors, drawing on different areas of clinical experience and training, covering a wide and diverse array of presenting issues. Key to our mission is creating a supportive community of counsellors and supporting each other through our work.