Ontario-born and raised Jessy Roos came to Calgary with plans to earn a psychology degree. But after two years, rising tuition costs led her to leave academia behind, and she built her resume as an administrative assistant and nanny instead.

Though her career as a therapist fell through, her passion for mental health failed to fade, and as fate would have it, she married Joel Roos, a registered psychologist. With Jessy’s business management and Joel’s clinical expertise, the pair found themselves with the ingredients for baking a clinic from scratch. 

They opened their practice in 2014 and later rebranded in 2016 under the name Cultivate, with Joel as the clinical director and Jessy as the executive director — something her 20-year-old self might have struggled to imagine. 

From offering services in eight languages to its pay-what-you-can program, Cultivate is rooted in a mission of accessibility and compassion. Jessy explains the Rooses are no strangers to life’s turbulence and how this is fuelling their commitment to attainable care.

Here is my conversation with Jessy:

Sarah Palmer: Some couples pick up crafts or travel. Was this your idea of a passion project? 

Jessy Roos: A little bit. We have always worked together. We’ve been together for almost 20 years, and we have always worked together in some capacity, whether we were working for the same company or not. I know some people sort of look at that and go: ‘That’s a choice [working with your significant other].’ It is, and it’s not without its speed bumps. But overall, this is something that we are very passionate about. We really enjoy working together, so we’re willing to deal with the conflict that comes up naturally.

Every clinic is unique in the way that it comes up, whether it’s a part of a larger group, or it’s more — I don’t want to call it a small business — but it must have had some challenges. How was that to overcome?

I think the biggest part has been that I don’t have a formal education in some of the things that I do, so there’s been a significant learning curve for things like accounting, things like the leadership aspect of being able to have hard conversations. Those are things I developed over time and certainly through trial and error. My team has been really gracious about that. Aside from that, we have five kids together, so life has been very full, and we have done a lot of those years without full-time child care. We’ve had a lot of loss and sort of familial mess happening over the last couple of years. 

When you’re doing it with family, that comes inherently, right? It’s hard to separate church and state that way. 

It’s particularly difficult when we have family stuff. Full disclosure, we lost our youngest child in December, and that sort of blew our lives apart. 

I’m sorry. 

Yeah, and that sort of threatened to blow the business apart, because both the people who try to keep things running, especially Joel, in his role as clinical director. He needs to be available as a supervisor. That was a really significant thing for us to try to negotiate, where we were able to step back as much as we could and support our living kids and support our own grieving and all of these different things, while not abandoning our team. For all of the struggles that we’ve had, we owe everything else to our team. 

Yeah, and I’m sorry to hear that, but that’s admirable. It does take a village, hey?

You learn that the hard way when your child dies. I mean, our team was at our child’s funeral, they were showing up with meals, cleaning our kitchen, and things like that. It’s so special. I would not expect that from work colleagues.

When you think about the traditional environment, at least, right?

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Absolutely. There’s obviously been struggles, significant ones, especially over the last year, but everything is so worth it because of the people that we work with. 

Now I’m curious, how did you land on the name Cultivate?

It dropped into my brain one day. I spent months working on the rebranding. I was a little bit loath to touch something that was on the nose in terms of growth and nature — I definitely didn’t want to go in that direction. When Cultivate popped into my head, I was like, ‘that’s it!’ Because that’s not just growth as it happens — cultivation requires attention, effort, education, and support. It is a very intentional type of growth, as opposed to growth for the sake of it. It doesn’t typically happen alone — it happens in a community with the support of multiple pieces. 

If you were to say Cultivate’s mission statement in one sentence, what would you say?

Grow the life you want. It’s about that intentional movement towards the life that you want. We try to frame ourselves as approachable professionals. I joke sometimes in interviews that we know our shit, and sometimes we swear about it — we’re just normal people who are here to help.

Absolutely, and then upon opening the clinic, what did you make a priority? Were there any gaps in the healthcare system that you were trying to fill?

We see two sides of things: the public-facing service provider side, and then we see the clinician professional side, in the therapy space, and the gaps that exist there. In the public-facing side, mental health was obviously historically neglected as part of universal health care. It’s incredibly frustrating because there are so many piecemeal services available. There is no sort of continuity of care, and there’s very little accessible long-term care. 

It just makes sense to keep supporting people until they have reached their goals, until they have the tools they need to thrive, until they have processed their trauma, and they can go out into the world and be well and also be good for their communities. There’s that ripple effect there.

What sets Cultivate apart from other clinics in Calgary?

One is the way that we treat our staff. I don’t want to insinuate that other practices are somehow being big meanies or underpaying — they’re doing what is typical and historically average in the industry. We’re looking to say that might be what’s average and regular to find, but we’re not happy with that. We’re always sort of looking at ways we can improve the clinician experience so that we get to keep these amazing people for a really long time. The stakes are too high to be coming in burned out, stressed, sick, lonely, or tired.

The other thing is this pay-what-you-can program that we do. We’ve been doing that since 2019, and since then, I think we’re approaching $3 million worth of services given away to the community. So that’s either free or subsidized. I guess it’s traditionally called a ‘sliding scale.’ There is a fee schedule: it’s $235, and we just say, please come in — without means testing, without having to grovel and beg and fill out a million forms — you just tell us what you need and how much you can comfortably pay for that, and we will do our absolute best to match you with the right person as quickly as we can. 

For us, that’s sort of deeply embedded in our values. We’re not a non-profit, officially, so we are doing this without government grants, charity receipts, fundraising, anything like that. We are just making the numbers work and trying to keep the number of lower-fee sessions as high as possible. Again, I’m going to swear here, but we say ‘we have a no rich assholes at the top’ rule. My Prius is parked out front — I’ve got a 2012 Prius. We’re not going on multiple vacations a year, we’re not putting in a new kitchen. We are very focused on making sure that the money that comes through our doors is being redistributed back to the community, and also making sure that compensation stays high for our team.

You mentioned that it’s sort of like a sliding scale, but in a lot of ways, it’s not. From my understanding, that’s providing your proof of income, and then paying what you can from there, because you guys don’t ask for proof of income?

Our intake form is the same for everyone. So we keep it as minimal as possible, because my experience has been that financially accessible programs are often narrow in their focus. We have a checklist of those basics — anxiety, depression, relationship stress, work stress, chronic illness, disability, gender identity, sexuality. Then we just say this is the fee schedule, it’s $235 an hour. We recognize that not everybody can make that work, so please consider your access to insurance funding, and just tell us what you can comfortably afford. 

We believe that if we show a level of trust to our clients, they respond with honesty. We have a lower no-show rate than the industry average, because people take this seriously. It’s really easy to be a little bit cynical and assume that people are going to take advantage and that people are going to lie, and I just don’t see that. 

How does affordable care, like what Cultivate offers, help the community as a whole?

Myself, as an example, I deal with childhood trauma. I personally am neurodivergent, and I’m also disabled, so I’m hard of hearing, and I grew up with a sort of chaotic family unit. For me, access to therapy has helped me become a better parent, so that I’m not repeating the things that my parents put upon my brother and me growing up. 

There’s sort of that generational ripple effect where if you’re increasing resourcing and the emotional resiliency, and you’re reducing the amount of trauma that is being put onto the next generation, they’re going to go and create a healthier next generation. You know, hurt people, hurt people. So if we’re reducing the number of hurt people and we’re helping the hurt people heal, we’ll automatically create a softer, kinder, more respectful community where the priorities and values are well aligned for the flourishing and safety of humans.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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