The Chair

There is a chair in our office in Plano that has held a lot of people.

A teenager who stopped sleeping. A husband and wife who had run out of ways to talk to each other. A widow six months in, still setting two places at the table. A pastor who had counseled everyone else and had nowhere left to go himself.

For more than twenty years, HopeWorks Counseling has kept that chair open. We are a nonprofit, not a private practice — which means we set fees by what a person can actually pay, and we hold part of our schedule for people who can pay very little or nothing at all. Licensed professional counselors. Real clinical care, integrated with faith for those who want it. In person in Plano, and by telehealth across roughly twenty North Texas counties, including rural ones where the nearest counselor is an hour's drive away.

That model works because someone pays for the empty seat. Reduced-fee care is not free care — it is care that somebody else covered.

This North Texas Giving Day, we are asking you to cover one.

Our goal is $20,000, which funds 160 counseling hours for North Texans who could not otherwise walk through our door. Not overhead. Not a building. Hours — the actual unit of work that gets a person from the worst month of their life to the other side of it.

Anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, addiction, marriages on the edge, children who need play therapy to say what they cannot say out loud. The need in North Texas is not the problem. The waiting list is.

Give today and keep the chair open.