Partnering for Founder Mental Health
When the Right People Find Each Other
How a partnership with one 1909 member is helping us care for the human behind the business.
When Jessenia Acuna joined 1909 in 2026, neither she nor our team knew exactly where the relationship would lead. She came to us as the founder of Soho Holistic Therapy, a boutique psychotherapy and wellness practice built around caring for the whole person and helping people better navigate the stress, anxiety, burnout, relationships, and other challenges that come with modern life.
A Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Registered Yoga Teacher, and Certified Integrative Mental Health Professional, Jessenia has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of mental health and wellness. Her approach incorporates traditional therapeutic practices alongside tools rooted in movement, breathwork, mindfulness, positive psychology, and neuroscience. Her work has a particular focus on high performers, creative leaders, professionals, and entrepreneurs navigating demanding careers and the pressure that often comes with them.
In many ways, the people she had built her practice to support looked a lot like the people walking through the doors of 1909 every day.
Jessenia joined 1909 as part of our Spring Grow cohort, a group of 10 founders actively working to grow their businesses. Over the course of 12 weeks, the cohort moved through practical, hands-on workshops led by different experts across areas of business including strategy, marketing, sales, finance, leadership, and more. The program is designed to meet founders where they are, giving them access to expertise they can immediately apply to the very real challenges happening inside their businesses.
For Jessenia, it was an opportunity to work on the growth of Soho Holistic Therapy while also beginning to build relationships within a new entrepreneurial community in South Florida. At almost exactly the same time, something was happening more than a thousand miles away that would eventually bring our paths together in a way none of us had anticipated.
In April, 1909 team members Danielle and Abby traveled to New York City for GCUC, the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, a gathering of coworking and community space operators from around the world. While there, GCUC founder Liz Elam introduced GCUC Access, an initiative encouraging coworking operators to think about the role their spaces and communities could play in addressing loneliness and making mental health resources more accessible to their members.
Hearing Liz speak immediately resonated with us because, while the initiative itself was new to us, the idea behind it wasn't. When we started 1909 in 2018, one of the things we talked about wanting someday was an office within our space occupied by a licensed therapist who could provide free or discounted services to our members. It was an idea rooted in our own experiences with entrepreneurship and our belief that founders need support that extends far beyond what happens inside their businesses.
1909 exists in large part because entrepreneurship can be incredibly lonely and challenging. Building something from the ground up can affect your health, relationships, confidence, identity, and overall well-being in ways that aren't always visible from the outside. We have personally experienced burnout, anxiety, depression, and the effects that prolonged stress can have on nearly every part of life. We have also watched countless founders around us experience their own versions of the same thing.
"We have always believed that the human behind the business matters just as much."
The 1909 TeamFrom the beginning, our goal has been to support not only the businesses being built within our community, but the people building them. We provide business education, mentorship, workspace, connections, and opportunities because those things matter, but we have always believed that the human behind the business matters just as much.
Listening to Liz speak in New York brought that original idea back to the surface in a much more tangible way. When we returned to Florida, we went to the team and essentially said, "We need to do this." The timing turned out to be pretty remarkable because the person who might be able to help us do it was already part of our community.
Jessenia was finishing the Grow program and beginning to lean further into her new community in South Florida. Through Soho Holistic Therapy, she had built a practice around many of the same challenges we saw founders navigating every day. Having previously been licensed to see clients in person in New York, she was also at a point where she was thinking about what expanding her work and presence in South Florida could look like.
We approached her with the idea of creating wellness programming specifically for the 1909 community and making one-on-one support available to members at no cost to them. There were still plenty of logistics to figure out and questions we didn't yet have answers to, but Jessenia's response was an exuberant yes.
By August 2026, only a few months after that conference in New York and Jessenia's completion of the Grow program, we officially began offering 1909 members free access to one-on-one wellness sessions with Jessenia, along with group sessions designed around the experiences and challenges our community is navigating.
For us, the partnership represents something much bigger than adding another benefit to a membership. It's an example of what can happen when community works the way we believe it should.
This was the kind of serendipity you can't manufacture, but you can create the conditions for it.
When you bring people with different skills, experiences, businesses, and ambitions into the same community and give them opportunities to learn together and get to know one another, you never quite know where those relationships will lead. The person who enters the community looking for support with their own business may eventually become the person whose expertise helps strengthen the community for everyone else.
The partnership also reflects Jessenia's philosophy at Soho Holistic Therapy, where the focus is on supporting the whole person rather than treating one part of someone's life in isolation. That idea feels particularly relevant to entrepreneurship, where the line between the founder and the business can become incredibly blurry.
Founders are often simultaneously trying to make payroll, manage employees, maintain relationships, raise families, find customers, navigate financial uncertainty, make major decisions, and somehow take care of themselves in the process. The pressures of entrepreneurship don't conveniently stay at the office when the workday ends, and the resources available to founders shouldn't stop at business strategy either.
Business education matters. Mentorship, capital, connections, and access to opportunity matter. But so does having somewhere to turn when the weight of building something begins affecting the person carrying it.
Our partnership with Jessenia is still in its early stages, and we're already thinking about how it can grow. As we look ahead, we're beginning to explore grant opportunities and other sources of funding that could help offset the cost of providing this type of resource and allow us to expand the mental health and wellness support available to our members.
Jessenia originally walked through our doors looking for support as she grew Soho Holistic Therapy. Within months, the expertise and business she brought into the community became part of how 1909 could better support hundreds of other entrepreneurs.
That full-circle moment is a pretty good representation of what we hope community at 1909 can be. It's not simply a place where entrepreneurs come to build their own companies. It's a place where people with different experiences and expertise find one another, where a conversation or connection can lead somewhere no one expected, and where supporting one founder can ultimately create an opportunity to support many more.
Sometimes the impact of bringing the right people into the same community isn't obvious when they first walk through the door. Jessenia's story is a reminder of what can happen when you give those relationships the space to grow.