As a former middle school teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, our founder, Christina Guilbeau, saw the impact of the lack of accessible mental health services in our schools firsthand.

She also experienced the difficulties of navigating the mental health care system as a Black woman whose struggles began in adolescence. Christina came to understand the challenges of the licensure process for mental health clinicians when her close friends and family members began to pursue various graduate degrees in the field, and she felt they were an under-leveraged resource given the insufficient amount of providers in our country. She was then motivated to virtually connect adolescents in need of accessible mental health support with highly-motivated and supervised clinician interns in need of licensure hours.

Christina holds a B.A. in Psychology from Amherst College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she earned a Certificate in Social Innovation and Public Management. She was one of two students to receive the Stanford Social Innovation Fellowship in 2019, which provided her with the funding to launch Hopebound.