The Towel and the Seed: Early Lessons in Identity and Belonging

Dr. Collins’ journey begins in a small steel mill town near Pittsburgh during the 1960s and 70s. As the only Black child on her street, she quickly learned to navigate dual worlds, one defined by her predominantly White neighborhood and another filled with the warmth and rhythm of Black church and civic life.

This early exposure ignited her awareness of race, belonging, and identity. A pivotal childhood moment brought those lessons into sharp relief: at six years old, she received a monogrammed towel with her name and the image of a little White girl. When she asked her mother why, the reply was a quiet truth “They don’t make things like that for us.”

Six decades later, Dr. Collins still keeps that towel as a powerful reminder. It became a lifelong symbol of exclusion and ultimately, motivation to create what society failed to provide.

Her time at Syracuse University in the late 1970s became a turning point. Immersed in a vibrant community of Black students from across the diaspora, she experienced belonging and cultural affirmation that had long been missing. “We created our own spaces gospel choirs, dance troupes, fraternities, and sororities. It was our version of an HBCU experience at a predominantly White institution,” she reflected.

Though her major wasn’t psychology, her passion for exploring culture, race, and faith grew stronger through her studies in sociology. A paper she wrote on the Black Church awarded an A+ “planted a seed” that would later bloom into her life’s calling.

Building What the System Ignored

Years later, as she pursued her master’s degree in community counseling and Ph.D. in Christian counseling, Dr. Collins began to see systemic gaps in the profession. “Most counseling theories weren’t built for People of Color,” she explained. “They ignored race-based, historical, and intergenerational trauma.”

The frameworks she had been trained in were predominantly Eurocentric developed to be applied universally, but blind to cultural nuance. “Just like my mother said, ‘They don’t make things like that for us.’”

Rather than accepting this, she decided to change it. “If the system wasn’t built for us, I’d start building my own frameworks,” she said. That resolve became the cornerstone of New Seasons Counseling, Training, and Consulting, a space designed to teach, counsel, and mentor with cultural awareness at its core.

New Seasons: Redefining Therapy Through Culture

At New Seasons, Dr. Collins delivers a holistic model of care that bridges counseling, education, and leadership development. Her organization provides culturally grounded therapy, advanced continuing education for clinicians, and mentoring for emerging trainers.

Her workday is a balance of direct counseling, curriculum design, and national speaking engagements. She counsels Women of Color who, as she notes, “often experience therapy for the first time as a space that honors their racial, gender, and spiritual identities.”

She reframes therapy as liberation, not treatment. “Healing begins with psychological safety,” she said. “I don’t fix people. I help them unlearn systems that told them they were broken.”

The Three-Tier Model: Healing, Training, and Transformation

Central to her philosophy is the Three-Tier Model, a framework that scales impact from the individual to the institutional level.

• Tier One: Direct counseling for adults providing space for culturally attuned healing.
• Tier Two: Continuing education for licensed clinicians — equipping professionals to address cultural trauma with humility and historical understanding.
• Tier Three: The MultiCultural MasterClass (MC²), a “train-the-trainer” program empowering counselors to become educators themselves, multiplying impact nationwide.

Through this structure, Dr. Collins ensures that multicultural competence becomes not a niche, but a necessity in mental health education.

Beyond Metrics: Defining Success as Liberation

In an industry often dominated by metrics and outcomes, Dr. Collins introduces a more human measure of success liberation.

“Traditional success metrics don’t fit in a decolonized therapy model,” she explained. “Healing can’t be measured by performance data. For People of Color, it’s about freeing themselves from external definitions of success and learning that their anger, grief, or rage are not flaws, but signs of systemic pain.”

Her work reframes from healing not as recovery from personal weakness, but as reclamation of identity and dignity.

Leading a New Generation of Healers

As an educator, mentor, and national thought leader, Dr. Collins is paving the way for a new generation of multicultural therapists. Through the MC² program, she mentors counselors as they navigate entrepreneurship, imposter syndrome, and systemic barriers.

“I want to normalize success for women of color and create a roadmap they can follow,” she said. “Representation itself is a form of healing.”

Her impact continues to grow through her Multicultural Mindset Podcast and her book, overlooked: Counselor Insights for the Unspoken Issues in Black American Life, both powerful extensions of her mission to expand the reach of culturally informed care.

From Invisibility to Influence

From a six-year-old girl holding a towel that told her she didn’t belong to a nationally recognized educator shaping the future of multicultural mental health, Dr. LaVerne Hanes Collins has transformed invisibility into influence.

Her story is not just about therapy; it’s about rewriting systems, reclaiming narratives, and building spaces where every individual can see themselves fully and freely. Through her leadership, she has become one of the most trusted and transformative voices in modern mental healthcare, guiding a generation of healers toward a more just, affirming, and compassionate future.