New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, LLC was founded by Dr. LaVerne H. Collins, driven by a deep personal and professional awareness that dominant mental health models often fail to address the unique needs of People of Color. Dr. Collins' journey—from being the first African American child in her neighborhood to navigating a predominantly White university and eventually losing her adult son to suicide—revealed the powerful truth: “The burden of systemic disparities and power differentials is invisible to anyone who doesn’t experience it.”

With a Master’s in Community Counseling and a PhD in Christian Counseling, Dr. Collins realized that most counseling frameworks were rooted in Eurocentric ideals, often ignoring the cultural context, historical trauma, and resilience embedded in the lives of marginalized groups. This realization led to the creation of New Seasons, initially envisioned as a private practice offering culturally responsive therapy. However, the need for broader change quickly became apparent, prompting Dr. Collins to expand the mission to include training other therapists and institutions to move beyond token diversity toward sustainable, liberating care.

Today, New Seasons is a national movement with three core offerings: culturally responsive counseling, continuing education for clinicians, and the transformative MultiCultural MasterClass (MC²) that empowers clinicians—particularly women of color—to become thought leaders in mental health. Dr. Collins’ work has earned widespread recognition, including being named one of USA Leaders Magazine's 10 Most Influential Healthcare Leaders to Watch in 2025. Her book, Overlooked: Counselor Insights for the Unspoken Issues in Black American Life, is now used in university programs and clinical training, and her podcast, The Multicultural Mindset, continues to grow, amplifying the voices of those striving for systemic change in mental health care.

Interview Highlights

What core services does New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, LLC offer, and how do these services cater to the unique needs of individuals seeking support?

New Seasons offers a unique, integrative approach to mental health through its three-tiered structure:

• Direct Counseling Services: We provide therapy for adults, particularly women of color, in a way that is identity-affirming and rooted in cultural awareness. Our sessions go beyond problem management. We invite people to unpack the layered realities of being Black, Brown, or otherwise marginalized in a society that often misreads, misjudges, or completely overlooks their lived reality. We address issues such as racialized grief, code-switching fatigue, imposter syndrome, and the role of cultural norms and personal race narratives within safe, culturally responsive frameworks.
• Continuing Education for Providers: Clinicians across the country attend my CE trainings to learn how to practice with cultural humility, honor historical trauma, and synthesize racial identity work into their practices. These trainings challenge the default Eurocentric lens and offer new, decolonized ways to conceptualize mental health.
• The MultiCultural MasterClass (MC²): This flagship 12-month program prepares experienced clinicians to become trainers in multicultural mental health. Participants receive intensive mentorship, content development support, and learn to lead workshops that center cultural context and liberation counseling. Most participants are women of color, and many go on to lead their own training initiatives, extending our impact exponentially.

Depression is often associated with isolation. How does therapy at your practice create a supportive environment for those experiencing it?

First, I make the distinction between sadness and clinical depression. In pop culture, ‘depression’ is often used as a umbrella term for emotional exhaustion, discomfort, and sadness, which can stem from navigating oppressive systems, surviving microaggressions, enduring generational trauma, and facing societal invisibility. While this pain may not meet the criteria for depression, it is still valid.

I create a psychologically safe space where people don’t have to justify, manage, or bypass their feelings. We normalize the impact of systemic injustice on emotional well-being and invite people to explore their inner lives without fear of being misunderstood or pathologized. We don’t blame people for their sadness nor pathologize them when the real source is systemic oppression.

Many tell me that therapy at New Seasons is the first time they feel fully seen—as whole people with stories, culture, and resilience.

Additionally, I believe that a diversity-informed practice must be trauma-informed at every level. Identity-based marginalization, such as racism, is psychological violence, and marginalized communities carry varying degrees of trauma. In therapy, we honor this trauma and don’t blame people for the damage caused by unjust systems.

How do your consulting services help organizations move beyond check-box compliance to achieve real, sustainable change in their workplace culture?

Too often, organizations approach their multicultural awareness initiatives as a checklist or annual training requirement. At New Seasons, we take a very different approach. We believe real change is systemic and must be culture-driven, not compliance-driven.

Our consulting begins with an honest assessment of where the organization stands in terms of equity, safety, and inclusion. From there, we work with leadership to develop strategies that embed cultural responsiveness into hiring, team dynamics, communication, and wellness practices.

I offer workshops that go deep: addressing hidden biases, power dynamics, and the emotional labor that marginalized employees often carry. Our goal is to help organizations become places of true belonging, where wellness and justice are not sidelined but centered.

How do you measure success in your educational programs, both in terms of clinician performance and client outcomes?

I don’t focus on success metrics because that kind of focus is antithetical to the idea of decolonizing therapy.  Performance metrics and outcomes are necessary in business, but they’re not freeing when it comes to emotional healing for people who carry the scars of societal wounds. 

Healing must be liberating for People of Color. One sign of growth can be the freedom to get unbound from externalized success measures that People of Color have internalized. Sometimes healing involves identifying ways in which they have denied themselves the right to be angry because they feared their justified rage would be judged and chided by others. And sometimes healing is knowing that their rage is not inherently bad, but a sign of systemic problems that they are tired of being blamed for. That's success in the context of decolonized therapy and liberation counseling. 

Our training alumni often report that our training reorients their entire approach to therapy. They gain tools to dismantle bias in themselves and their institutions. Many go on to become speakers, advocates, and trainers themselves. Through MC², we help them develop their own culturally grounded content, so the ripple effect continues long after the course ends.

Looking ahead, what key trends or changes do you anticipate in the mental wellness and counseling industry, and how is New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, LLC preparing to address them?

Three key trends are reshaping the mental health landscape: decolonizing therapy, where more practitioners are rejecting Eurocentric frameworks and incorporating culturally grounded, ancestral, and liberatory practices; multicultural wellness in the workplace, as organizations realize that employee wellness must include mental health practices that honor diverse identities and experiences; and scaling cultural competency, with the growing demand for multicultural mental health services driving a rise in the need for qualified trainers. The MC² program is preparing the next wave of leadership in this space.

Dr. LaVerne H. Collins - Founder

Dr. LaVerne H. Collins is a nationally recognized counselor educator, author, and Founder of New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, LLC. Raised near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Collins navigates cultural dualities, transforming them into platforms for healing and change. Through her book, articles, speaking engagements, and the MC² program, she leads a movement toward decolonized, culturally grounded mental health care. As a mentor and advocate, she empowers women of color in leadership and mental health entrepreneurship.

“New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, LLC’s core values remain rooted in liberation, equity, representation, and the belief that mental health must be contextual, historical, and cultural. New Seasons is not just a counseling practice; it is a movement for systemic change.”