Our Story

April 2026 // Great Barrington, MA

Common Collab was born out of a moment of community need. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the Berkshires, like everywhere, was watching its behavioral health infrastructure strain under the weight of a crisis that was already bad and getting worse. We saw a gap and decided to try to fill it.

Our founding team came together from different corners of the behavioral health field: clinical social work, psychiatry, recovery coaching, therapeutic companion models, peer support. That breadth wasn't accidental. We believed, and still believe, that the most honest version of behavioral health treatment draws from all of those disciplines rather than picking one lane and defending it.

We started as a more traditional outpatient program. Evidence-based, trauma-informed, well-intentioned. But we kept running into the same tension: the traditional IOP model, and especially the attendance and engagement standards imposed by health insurance companies, kept getting in the way of actually serving our clients well. We found ourselves in frequent conflict with structures that didn't make sense for every person sitting in front of us. We found ourselves enforcing arbitrary rules and dressing them up as clinical wisdom. That felt dishonest.

So we changed the model.

What we have now is something we're genuinely proud of. We offer more groups than a traditional IOP, across a wider range of modalities, with more flexibility in how clients engage with them. We set clear expectations and hold people accountable to what they've agreed to. But the structure is built around the client's actual life and goals, not around satisfying a utilization reviewer. We stopped pretending we know exactly what recovery looks like for every person who walks in, and started being honest that our job is to give people the tools and the space to figure that out for themselves.

We all came to the Berkshires from elsewhere, fell in love with it, and stayed. We've bought homes here, started families, built relationships. We care about this community the way you care about a place you chose. We started Common Collab because we saw what the community needed and believed we had something real to offer. Four years in, through late nights and early mornings, through people we've watched rebuild their lives and people we've lost, we still believe that.

We will never solve Berkshire County's substance use problems entirely. But we will certainly try.

With love and gratitude,

The Common Collab Team