2018 ANNUAL REPORT TO SHAREHOLDERS
The Benefit Corporation Difference
Well Clinic is a California benefit and professional corporation as well as a Certified B Corporation. We were initially recognized as a Certified B Corporation by B Lab, an independent nonprofit organization, in 2016, and B Lab recertified our status in 2018. Also in 2018,
Well Clinic officially converted to operate as a benefit corporation under California law by amending its articles of incorporation.
As a benefit corporation, our mission is to make mental health and wellness accessible to the general public by reducing the stigma associated with engaging in these services while also making them comfortable and easy to obtain. As a marriage and family therapy clinic, our core focus is to provide couples, families, and individuals with the support they need to improve their relationships, lives, and ability to function well in the larger community.
We specialize in helping busy professionals and understand how to work within any time, scheduling and financial constraints our patients may face. Additionally, community partners may be eligible for complimentary services and training.
According to B Lab’s website (https://bcorporation.net/), “Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good.”
Today, there is a growing community of more than 1,600 Certified B Corps from 42 countries and over 120 industries working together toward 1 unifying goal: to redefine success in business.
Well Clinic became a B Corp because we understand how interconnected all the realms of life are.
If we want to improve mental health and wellness in our community, we must also be providing a nurturing and healthy workplace, and that workplace can only exist if we sustain a healthy planet.
At all levels of our organization, we strive to show the world what prioritizing mental health can look like in our modern age.
The Change We Seek
Incidents of depression and anxiety are continually on the rise.
Well Clinic seeks to reverse this trend by eliminating the stigma of going to therapy. Instead, we strive to make these services accessible and common.
Most mental health professionals work in individual offices or large agencies where the ability to resource and connect is limited. Well Clinic makes community and working in a shared space an explicit value and priority, so that staff have an internal community.
This, in turn, emulates what they strive to create for their clients as well. Well Clinic wants to empower our clients to make human connection a priority in their lives. This starts with their experience of a clinic that is warm and welcoming, and a clinician who is accessible and a good fit for their needs.
Highlights from 2018
During 2018, we provided services to over eighteen hundred people, with a total of nearly seventeen thousand hours of psychotherapy provided. Additionally, four thousand of those hours were rendered by therapists-in-training who provided services on a sliding scale and received training and supervision for each for each of these hours. The combined impact of bringing mental health services to those in need while also providing education and training to improve the standard of care for the future generation of psychotherapists is what makes Well Clinic unique in it’s social mission.
Our greatest challenge during 2018 was the continuing rising cost of doing business in the city of San Francisco while maintaining our commitment to paying our staff a competitive wage and health care benefits. As a result we had to raise all of our rates for services slightly. We still maintain a sliding scale for services but found it necessary to make an adjustment across the spectrum of our fees in order to maintain the quality of services we want to provide.
Overall Social and Environmental Performance
We chose to work with B Lab and to measure our overall social and environmental performance based on B Lab’s standards because they have a mission that very much aligns with our own and have set the gold standard for corporate accountability and social impact work.
B Lab’s certification process involves a rigorous examination of our company practices, in both social and environmental impact categories. The examination considers five aspects of Well Clinic’s operations referred to as “Impact Areas” under B Lab’s structure. The Impact Areas include (i) governance, (ii) workers, (iii) community, (iv) environment, and (v) customers. The assessment consists of a thorough self- assessment questionnaire, follow-up interviews conducted by B Lab’s representatives, and verification of company-provided information.
Well Clinic’s score under B Lab’s certification process in 2018 was 81.2, while our score in 2016 was 89.1. Our score decreased primarily as a result of a change in their assessment tool which became more comprehensive in the interim. It does not reflect a change in our business practices which if anything have continued to improve.
We base our own internal assessment of our performance during 2018 on B Lab’s standards, aligning with its impact areas as assessed in our 2018 recertification process. Our B Lab assessment is publicly available on the B Lab web page (https://bcorporation.net/directory/well-clinic).
Over the course of the last year since this report was completed Well Clinic’s practices in the five measured impact areas have remained consistent and we have no reason to believe that these scores, or the qualitative aspects of these assessment areas have changed.
Board Assessment
After carefully considering Well Clinic’s performance, the company’s board of directors determined that Well Clinic did not fail to pursue its general public benefit purpose in any material respects during the fiscal year 2018, and that Well Clinic was successful in pursuing its public benefit during 2018 in all material respects.
Major Shareholders
As of May 15, 2019, Cameron Yarbrough was Well Clinic’s sole shareholder of record, owning one hundred percent (100%) of the company’s outstanding shares of stock, and Well Clinic is unaware of any connection between B Lab, its directors, its officers, or its material owners, on the one hand, and Well Clinic, its directors, its officers, and its sole shareholder, on the other hand, including any financial or governance relationship that might materially affect the credibility of the objective assessment of B Lab’s standards.
2019 Goals
Building on our history of success, we have adopted the following five goals.
- Living Wage. We plan to pay our employees 15-24% above the established living wage for the San Francisco Bay Area by April 2020, while we currently pay our employees 1-14% above the established living wage.
- Volunteering. We plan to adopt a system to track the percentage of per capita
worker volunteer, community service, or pro bono time, and to target 1-2.4% of employees’ time spent on such activities. - Local Purchasing and Hiring. We plan to augment our written preference for hiring and recruiting local managers, with written preference at each facility to purchase from local suppliers and ready-to-use lists of preferred local suppliers/vendors for specific facilities.
- Independent Contractors. We plan to supplement our routine processes for providing feedback to independent contractors and for soliciting their feedback, with a process to ensure independent contractors are paid the equivalent of a living wage.
- Virtual Office Stewardship. We plan to (i) establish a written policy encouraging environmentally preferred products and practices (e.g., recycling) in employee virtual offices; (ii) share guidelines with employees regarding environmental stewardship in home offices (e.g., energy efficiency); (iii) create a policy for the safe disposal of e-waste and other hazardous materials purchased for employee home offices; and (iv) to provide employees with a list of environmentally preferred vendors for office supplies.
Contact Us
Well Clinic
Potrero Hill
383 Rhode Island Street, Suite 201
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: (415) 952-0290
Fax: (415) 484-7229
Email: [email protected]
