Why Anchored In Counseling Exists

In 2018, Krista McCulloch and her family lost their home to a fire. A total loss. Everything in it gone. She founded Anchored in Hope Counseling from temporary housing, in the months that followed. That order of events is not incidental. It is the reason the practice exists in the form it does.

“When you go through an experience that’s life altering, life changing, it really causes you to step back, reexamine. What am I doing, why am I doing what I’m doing, is it meaningful and impactful in the way that I feel it should be?” She had been asking a version of that question for years. The fire made it impossible to keep postponing the answer. “This life experience broke down some of those barriers that were there for me before that kept me from stepping out.”

The wall she kept running into Krista McCulloch, MSW, LISW-S, spent years working inside large community mental health agencies. She believed in what they were trying to do. “I really identified with the mission behind a lot of these agencies.” The problem was what happened next. “I ran into a lot of red tape as far as feeling like I could truly help clients in the way that I felt like they deserved to be helped.” Some of that was administrative. Some was particular to the places she worked. The effect was always the same. She could see the deeper thing a client was carrying, and the structure around her would not let her reach it. “I just felt like I was not able to get to the deep-rooted things that clients were really struggling with.” There was a second thing driving her, and it mattered as much as the first. She wanted the people who came to see her to know they were truly seen as a individual. “It was important to me that clients that see me know that they’re not a number, and I’m able to truly help them and get to the bottom of what’s impacting their mental health, instead of just staying surface level.”

The gap nobody was filling Krista was also watching a structural problem in the greater Toledo area, and the longer she looked at it the more it bothered her. On one side were the large community mental health agencies. They accepted every insurance. Anyone could walk in. But they operated at volume, and volume has consequences for how much of a person’s story anyone has time to hear. On the other side were small private practices. More individual attention, more time, often a wider range of therapeutic approaches, but accepting only a narrow set of insurances, and frequently no Medicaid at all. “There wasn’t a lot of in-between, to be honest, out there.” That absence is the whole thesis of Anchored in Hope Counseling. Krista did not set out to build a better version of either model. She set out to build the thing that was missing between them. “What I really wanted to create was something different, where people could walk in the door, feel seen, heard, get an integrative level of care focusing on mind, body, spirit, while taking the insurances, so that everyone has equal access to that care.”

Why that combination is unusual It is worth being clear about why the middle was empty, because it wasn’t an oversight. Ohio is not short of mental health clinicians. The state has roughly 395 mental health providers per 100,000 residents, above the national average of 363 (America’s Health Rankings, 2025). And yet federal workforce data shows Ohio meeting only about 34% of the mental health need measured across its 139 designated shortage areas (HRSA, 2026). Those two facts only fit together one way. The clinicians exist. The question is who they will see. Krista wanted a practice small enough to give people real time, broad enough in its approaches to work with complicated presentations, and open to Medicaid. That combination asks an owner to take on the harder version of nearly every operational decision. That is the reason the middle was empty. It is also the reason she built there. What it grew into Anchored in Hope Counseling now operates out of one office at 1690 Woodlands Drive in Maumee, serving children, teens, adults, couples, and families across the greater Toledo area, including Toledo, Perrysburg, Sylvania, Rossford, Waterville, Whitehouse, and Bowling Green. The team has grown to more than thirty-five people: licensed independent social workers, licensed professional clinical counselors, art and expressive arts therapists, clinical supervisors, graduate trainees, case management, and administrative staff. There is a clinical director, an intern supervisor, a school-based services supervisor, and both youth and adult day treatment programs.

Krista holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in social work from Eastern Michigan University, with a specialization in children and families. She is fully trained in Brainspotting and EMDR, holds advanced training in nutritional and integrative approaches for mental health professionals, and is a certified provider of the Safe and Sound Protocol. Her clinical background includes work with foster youth, competitive athletes, perinatal populations, and developmental trauma. The practice does not provide medication management. What hasn’t changed Ask Krista what she’s building toward and the answer still points at the same wall she ran into fifteen years ago: “It is my perpetual hope that we can break down barriers keeping people from accessing compassionate, person-centered mental health treatment. I believe everyone deserves quality care and access to an integrative, comprehensive treatment model.” There is a second half to that, and it is not incidental either. She adds that she is “passionate about supporting helping professionals in a healthy environment where they can be validated, grow, and have a healthy work/life balance.” That is not a throwaway line for a practice of this size. Ohio’s community behavioral health organizations reported average workforce turnover of 41% in 2024 (Ohio Council of Behavioral Health & Family Services Providers, 2025). A therapist who leaves takes the relationship with them. Building a place clinicians want to stay is, in practical terms, part of building a place clients can rely on. The through-line A house fire is a good story, and it is not the point. The point is what Krista did with the question it forced on her. She had spent years knowing exactly what was wrong with how care was organized around her, and she had good reasons not to do anything about it. Losing the house took the reasons away.

What she built from that is a practice designed so that other people would not be lost in a system.