Can you help us secure a grant today?

One click a day through Oct. 15, here to support our project to address the crisis in the mental health training pipeline.

Walk-In has just been named a finalist for a Seward Coop Community Choice grant. Four of 8 organizations will be chosen to receive one month’s worth of cash register “round-up” donations in 2027 – usually totalling $8,000-$10,000. Anyone can vote once a day on line. You don’t have to be a member of the co-op. Can you help us secure this grant, and ask friends to do the same? To vote, click here.

How Walk-In will use the grant to help address the crisis in the mental health training pipeline:

Walk-In has provided free, no-appointment, anonymous mental health counseling since 1969. We rely completely on volunteer practitioners to do the counseling. Some of those volunteers are graduate students doing internships with us.

Through our work with the universities training the next generation, we have watched a crisis slowly unfold in the mental health field: Newly trained practitioners are leaving their fields — often because of the cost of supervision. The trend is toward a smaller and less diverse field. To counter this trend, Walk-In is building its professional supervision capacity — and this requires broad outreach to Minnesota practitioners.

By helping us secure this grant, you are helping to train a stronger, more diverse next generation of mental health practitioners,

Kate Fischer, our executive director, describes the initiative this way:

Walk-In has always understood that the quality of care we provide to clients depends entirely on the quality of support we provide to the clinicians delivering it. What we are building now is a formalization and expansion of that commitment: a supervision of practice program that we intend to be the strongest available in Minnesota — rigorous, multi-disciplinary, culturally responsive, and genuinely supportive of the whole clinician.

The mental health workforce is in crisis at its most critical juncture. More than half of mental health graduates still leave the field before becoming independently licensed, with associates earning low pay while juggling supervision costs and student debt, often working with the highest acuity clients with heavy caseloads and limited mentorship. More than a quarter of supervisees nationally pay for their own clinical supervision out of pocket, and some struggle so much to find affordable, quality supervision that counts toward licensure hours that they forgo licensure or leave the field entirely. . . .

Walk-In’s response to this crisis is structural. Post-graduate practitioners who volunteer on Walk-In’s clinic shifts receive supervised practice embedded in that experience — high-quality, multi-disciplinary, community-supported supervision in exchange for their clinical contribution to our mission. This is the baseline. For practitioners who want or need additional supervision hours beyond what shift work provides, Walk-In will offer enhanced access on a pay-what-you-can basis, ensuring that cost is never the reason a promising clinician leaves the field. Over time, funded supervision access will be available to practitioners from underrepresented communities, actively recruiting the diverse workforce our clients deserve. Walk-In’s commitment to diversity in the mental health workforce is not a separate program but a design principle embedded in how our supervision model works.

Equally important, Walk-In intends to become a place where supervisors themselves are trained, supported, and held in community. Many licensed clinicians are hesitant to take on supervision responsibilities — the liability, the complexity, the absence of peer support for the role — and so the pipeline of future supervisors narrows. Walk-In’s model, rooted in its Minneapolis home and built on collective care rather than isolated practice, is a natural incubator for the next generation of supervisors.

I think this initiative is worth a click a day. I hope you can help!

With gratitude,

Heather Martens, Director of Development.

To vote, click here.