Vanessa Flores Newton spent six years as a hospital social worker, then three more in a school district, before opening a solo private practice. As a therapist of color, she noticed a pattern in her own intake calls. Clients kept coming to her for two reasons at once: she was a clinician of color, and she took insurance, a combination that was hard to find in Austin. In 2018 she opened Colors of Austin Counseling to build the practice she wished had existed for her own clients, a group of BIPOC therapists representative of the people they were seeing.
As COAC grew into a multidisciplinary group practice licensed across Texas, offering everything from child play therapy to EMDR to Vanessa's own certification to facilitate Brené Brown's The Daring Way, the brand had to carry two things at once. There was the equity work: community partnerships that cover session costs for clients who need it, clinical supervision for social workers on their way to licensure, and a growing internship pipeline with UT's School of Social Work. And there was the plain fact that COAC is not free or reduced-fee care. It is care from a board-approved clinical supervisor and a team of clinicians who have invested in trauma certifications and years of specialized training, and Vanessa wanted the site to say so plainly.
We built COAC's brand and website language directly from the words Vanessa already uses with her own team and clients, brave space, people of culture, affirming, language she chose deliberately, so the site would sound like her practice instead of a generic therapy template.
Today COAC sees clients three years old and up, in person in Austin and virtually anywhere in Texas, alongside its clinical supervision program, its community partnerships, and its internship pipeline with UT. The brand finally carries what Vanessa built it to hold: the equity work she started COAC for, and the clinical caliber standing behind it.
