What started as a dream never left. High Hopes Counseling Foundation originated over more than a decade of late-night, long-distance phone calls between two mothers struggling to find affordable, quality mental and behavioral health care for their children. Both were working on their graduate degrees while holding multiple jobs. Both grew up in low socioeconomic households with family members exhibiting co-occurring mental health diagnoses. Both had learned to scaffold their own mental health needs in childhood due to lack of parental education, financial barriers, and the stigma surrounding mental health treatment.
Through trial and error, and hundreds of appointments — medical doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, speech and language specialists, school counselors, special education meetings, vision therapy, SPECT brain scans, genetic testing — these mothers pieced together care for themselves and their children. They promised each other they would make the road less difficult for the families who came after them.
High Hopes opened in 2020. The need was immediate and overwhelming — there was a six-month wait list for insurance-based mental health support in Orange County. High Hopes was seeing crisis clients two to three times per week while simultaneously supervising pre-licensed clinicians. They showed up anyway.
For the first five years, High Hopes was funded almost entirely by services alone — sustained by thousands of hours of donated clinical services, supervision, and board members carrying administrative and fundraising work on their own time.
In the early years, High Hopes held intimate Galas and restaurant fundraisers in hopes to raise funds to supplement scholarships. Hard work bu all involved and limited financial return — but still momentum. Because that is what the beginning of something real looks like. Not the big grant. Not the packed room. The small table. The folding chairs. The people who showed up anyway. In June 2025, High Hopes held its first annual walk: Miles for Milo. Milo was a client who understood this mission from the inside — someone who struggled with trauma, behavioral regulation, and self-medication. Someone High Hopes believed in. They lost Milo to an overdose. And their family and friends — in their grief, in their profound love for them — became some of High Hopes’ greatest supporters. Every mile walked in Milo’s name is a mile toward making sure the next person who needs what Milo needed gets it in time. Supporters donated almost $13,000 at the first walk.
In October 2025, High Hopes received its first major grant — $100,000 from the Samueli Foundation — to purchase and convert a van into a mobile therapy unit, bringing care directly to families who cannot come to a clinic.
High Hopes is now developing the Recharge Lab at a new location in Old Town Tustin, expanding its reach into more Orange County neighborhoods and communities.