Catalight: Changing lives with quality mental health care

September 16, 2022

With Lyra, Catalight is able to provide high-quality care, including a culturally diverse provider network. Tara Kousha, Catalight’s VP of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, shares her personal experience with therapy and the importance of culturally responsive care.

Catalight's journey with mental health care
Catalight is a non-profit family of companies with 650+ employees nationwide. With a broad base of clinicians, administrators, and hourly caregivers, Catalight supports people with developmental disabilities across their care journey.

Employee surveys in 2020 revealed high demand for mental health care at Catalight. A prolonged pandemic and ongoing social unrest had deeply affected its employees, who were experiencing lengthy wait times for mental health care through their previous EAP. Providing mental health support became an urgent priority. 

“If you have an employee in crisis, you’re basically handing them off to a system that doesn’t support them if you have a traditional EAP,” said Jennifer Bilyk Makokha, SVP of people and performance, Catalight. “Our employees are caregivers themselves, and if they don’t have the support they need, they can’t go out and support our clients. We have to provide that safety net for our team.”

In January 2022, Catalight launched Lyra to improve access to high-quality, culturally responsive mental health support for its diverse employee base, from clinicians to hourly caregivers. 

“We have PhDs, neuroscientists, and therapists in our workforce, and we ourselves are a healthcare organization. Many of our employees are credentialed and highly educated, seeking care for themselves. We can’t just offer a newbie provider to someone who is an expert in that field,” said Makokha. “What attracted us to Lyra is the evidence-based foundation with an incredibly high-quality provider network that had both experience and credibility.” 

Impact with Lyra: 
2 days is the average wait time to first available appointment with a Lyra provider (down from several weeks with Catalight’s previous EAP) 

8.5x higher engagement with Lyra compared to Catalight’s previous EAP 

What Catalight employees say about Lyra: 
“My family has utilized the services and we have been so impressed with the quality of therapists and how easy it was to get an appointment right away. This is hands down one of the most useful employee benefits that I have ever used and I am very grateful for it. It is a very practical modality and really lends itself to making meaningful change in a short period of time. I really cannot say enough good things about this service.”

Learn more about their story.