What's been happening at rainbow muse?

Hello! My name’s Lucy and I’m one of the art therapists at Rainbow Muse!

You might have noticed some changes at Rainbow Muse, with the website getting a make over and a very quiet Instagram page. I wanted to let you all know what’s been happening!

But first, a little of how we got here...

I first worked with Chenai in 2019 when she supervised my masters placement at Headspace Knox and when Chenai began Rainbow Muse, I was incredibly keen to join her. I began working at Rainbow Muse in 2020 and now that we’re moving towards the end of 2024, I can give you some insight to our journey and why we’re moving to a collective model.

Since 2019 Rainbow Muse has grown so much and seen such change while we’ve navigated trying to provide therapeutic supports that align with our values. When I started providing Art Therapy, I was completely new to how the NDIS worked and found myself learning so much from Chenai and the community.

When Sammy joined Chenai as a director of Rainbow Muse, we were able to grow our team and our presence in the community with our Dandenong Clinic hub and the learning continued!

Chenai started Tandara Pa Rainbow, a not-for-profit organisation to try and address the gaps in our systems and provided workshops and talks throughout 2023 while our Dandenong hub kept growing. The goal has always been to provide therapeutic supports that align with our values, to provide neuro-affirming, anti-oppressive and culturally inclusive support.

But growth over time has led Rainbow Muse to become a very busy place, and along with that, the growth in understanding our values and deciding how best to practice them has also changed.

Being a business with directors and managers is a clear hierarchical structure and we see this in the client therapist relationship. This hierarchical relationship within Rainbow Muse was becoming difficult to manage both due to the large amount of work and decision making required, but also because of the dissonance it creates for Chenai and Sammy who don’t want to participate further in structures they don’t believe in. They could take more money from their contractors to cover this extra work, but that doesn’t address the hierarchy which is in direct opposition to collective care and decolonising therapeutic spaces.

This led to Chenai deep diving into how to move through this issue, and she decided to offer everyone the invitation to become a collective.

This was a big surprise to some of the therapists (including me!) as we didn’t know how much behind the scenes work was building up and also because we were able to opt out of many decisions that needed to be made. And over the past few months we’ve had a lot of discussion time to try and figure out what this means for Rainbow Muse and for us as therapists.

So what does this mean?

Rainbow Muse is no longer a clinic with contracted therapists. Instead, Rainbow Muse is now a collective, and we all have our individual sole trader businesses who directly provide therapy services. Our clients will receive invoices from us as individual therapists, and our clients will be a part of the Rainbow Muse Collective as well.

Our therapists will be able to share their whole selves within their businesses instead of siloing off parts of themselves.

 FAQ's

Will it cost more for sessions?

Nope. This would only change if your therapist changed the cost in order to make sure their business expenses are also covered.

Why can’t you hire administrative staff instead?

Chenai and Sammy could choose to hire admin staff and take a greater percentage of the therapy fee to cover it, but this doesn’t address the lack of connection within a hierarchical structure and adds more separation between the team and our clients. Hiring admin would also mean that the therapists are paid less and don’t have the option to decide what they can and can’t manage. Our team of therapists have varied lived experience and capacity to work and may not be able to afford to be paid less.

What does this mean for the waitlist?

Instead of being on one giant waitlist, you can now individually contact the therapist you wish to work with. This means more people are seeing waitlist requests and allows for a clearer picture of what you might be looking for.

If you’ve been on the Rainbow Muse waitlist, I recommend jumping online and emailing the therapist or therapists you’d like to work with so they can check availability or add you to their personal waitlist or refer on if they don’t have capacity.

I have a question that you havent answered here.

Please email us! We'd love to know your question and help out where possible. However we'd love to invite you to remember that we're also humans who are muddling through too and we'd rather be transparent about that.

Change is HARD, and the therapists at Rainbow Muse Collective have a variety of timelines depending on what capacity they have at the moment. We might be slow to reply or not be able to give you the answer you want, or any answer at all!

That's our current reality as we build our collective together and find ways of working that are sustainable for us and our communities.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, we look forward to all of the future offerings and continued journies we have planned for the collective!