Our origin story.

Creating Kind Therapy Inc.
By Lundi Ramos, 2025

I was learning how to offer therapy I couldn’t afford to receive.

It was winter, 2012.

Coming out as queer and transitioning meant risking everything—being shunned by my community, expelled from religious school, fired from my church job. I was studying clinical mental health care, trying to piece myself back together while learning how to help others.

But the field I was entering wasn’t built for someone like me: queer, transgender, autistic, introverted, surviving on a single income. Maybe you know that feeling—when who you are collides with the world you’ve been handed.

Then, my graduate internship offered me the job of managing a nonprofit group practice in one of Colorado’s wealthiest counties. Even there, most people couldn’t afford our rates. Most of the therapists couldn’t afford their own therapy either.

The practice said it was doing its best. But it wasn’t enough for me. The numbers didn’t add up. My heart couldn’t do the math. And when my heart can’t do the math—I know something deeper is broken. I can’t let it go.

Insurance reimbursed poorly—when it reimbursed at all. Payments took six months, if they arrived. My salary was $38,000. Rent in Denver soared. Groceries, student loans, basic survival—it was impossible to juggle. I worked three jobs just to stay afloat.

I could go on. But most therapists have their own version of this story—a quiet war of trying to hold others while barely hanging on.

The system didn’t work. Not for therapists. Not for clients. And the people I most wanted to serve—transgender people, immigrants, sex workers, the forgotten—were sidelined entirely.

I learned that blaming “the system” is the favorite excuse for a toxic culture.
When accountability gets uncomfortable, they say: That’s just how it is.
When inequity is named, they shrug: We didn’t create the system.
When someone dares to imagine better, they deflect: Be realistic.
When a leader avoids responsibility, it’s: I can’t control a broken system.

They cancel culture—so they don’t have to confront their part in it.

But these aren’t just statements. They’re shields—used to defend the status quo, preserve power, avoid discomfort, and justify harm.

Systems don’t exist without people. And cultures don’t become toxic by accident—they’re protected, ignored, or excused into being.

Systems are not neutral. They’re built and upheld by people—often unconsciously, often out of fear, and sometimes out of deep disconnection from the communities they claim to serve.

The U.S. mental health industry says it’s here to help, but the system was built to break my spirit—and everything around it.

When we choose convenience over care, profit over people, or cynicism over courage, we are not “living in the real world”—we’re upholding a world that asks others to shrink, break, or disappear in order for us to feel safe.

We say we care about mental health. But if we’re not willing to change the systems that harm it—what are we really doing here?

When we stop hiding behind “the system,” we start reclaiming our responsibility to each other—and to the kind of workplace we say we believe in.

But I didn’t see that happening anywhere around me.

At times, the phobias in the air were so thick, I didn’t want the communities I specialized in to walk through the doors of the place where I worked.

So I left. Just two years in.
Not because I didn’t care.
But because I did.

In November 2014, I started a cannabis company in Seattle—searching for another way forward. I wanted to study how natural medicines might support mental health.

Nine months later, I walked away. The profit games were exhausting. The injustice unbearable. The same people who built the underground industry were still behind bars. And the people who put them there? Now profiting from the regulated market.

So I returned to mental health—this time, in crisis response. And again, I found the cracks impossible to live in. Another broken system. Another workplace built to burn people out.

Then one night, driving home from work to have dinner with my girlfriend, I pulled up to a stoplight. I was exhausted. Distracted.

“Don’t Take the Money” by The Bleachers was playing too loud.

Windows down. A soft breeze. My arm resting on the windowsill, fingers tapping to the beat—trying not to think, not to feel.

I looked to the right and saw a church. Empty parking lot.

It was a Tuesday. I’d grown up in that world—I knew how many churches sit empty most of the week.

Churches usually have quiet rooms. Confidential rooms. Lots of them. Rooms that could hold healing.

And it’s not just churches. Libraries. Community centers. Nonprofits. Spaces everywhere—sitting empty. Waiting, really—for a new kind of purpose.

I saw the gap. And the solution rose like a pulse beneath it.

Pattern recognition guides me. I’m someone who senses what’s unspoken—what’s ignored. Energetic gaps are my compass. I don’t always know what’s next, but I know when something’s missing—and what could live there instead.

That moment became a model: organizations, churches, and private practices offering unused space during the week. Therapists using those rooms to serve clients at a fixed, reduced cost—or free. Site-based partnerships that reduce overhead and increase access. Virtual options, too. The simplicity of it captivated me.

At that stoplight in LoHi, in my sun-aged 2005 white Nissan Pathfinder, I thought: This could work.

So I left my job in August 2016. It was the last paycheck I’d receive from an employer to date. I had one month of savings. No backup. No safety net. No one to call if it didn’t work. Just grief. Risk. Hope. Rebellion.

The chance to do something I believed in—because I wasn’t willing to accept what I was handed or become a critic on the sidelines.

I launched a fundraiser on Facebook. It flopped. Trump had just been elected. The world was spiraling. I raised $10,000—just enough to rent a small office in Aurora, Colorado, after our first site partner backed out.

But I had something stronger than certainty. I had belief—that something different could be built.

That’s how Kind Therapy Inc. began.
Not as a brand.
Not as a startup.
As a stake in the ground.

A nonprofit born from the refusal to accept the way things are.

We built a model that doesn’t just talk about access—it makes access real.
We built a workplace that doesn’t drain therapists—it honors our joy.
We built a system that says: Mental health care is a right. Full stop.

We’ve lived through political upheaval, a global pandemic, and a storm of social unraveling. And we’re still here. Because the gap still exists.

I didn’t create Kind to fix a system.
I created it to fill a void.

And I look forward to the day that gap disappears.

Until then—we’ll be here.