By Elizabeth Hoke
On this day, I was 30 years old and had just celebrated a year of sobriety (for the second time in my life since relapsing at 26, after starting a career of abusing drugs and alcohol early, around the age of 12). On that day, my life was more manageable than ever. I was working as a cocktail waitress at a comedy club in San Francisco on the weekends, teaching Pilates to business professionals at 6 am before they went to work and attending an alternative graduate school called California Institute of Integral Studies. The school had the only master’s program I could find that would accept a person who had never received good grades and had nothing to show for herself other than an intense and profound desire to help others. The two jobs made me just enough money to pay for rent, food, and books. I had to get loans to pay for the program, which was very expensive. And to add insult to injury, the school did not provide practical experience instead, they made it my job to find an off site location to train me. If I couldn’t get those hours, I wouldn’t be able to graduate.
I made countless calls, sent what I felt were a million emails, and was continually told that all practicum positions were full —I was losing hope. Luckily, the day before my semester started, someone gave me Stever Dallmans number, and he agreed to meet me immediately.
That next day, Stever and I talked for more than an hour during the interview. He told me the story of how he started the Liberation Institute. He said he struggled with addiction, was also in recovery, and committed his life to help others. He was inspired by the AA model of people helping people and wanted to create a community mental health clinic that could do the same. Back then, there were three options for mental health treatment in San Francisco. The first option was to pay cash, and only people with a lot of extra income could get help. The second option was to go through private insurance. Yet, there was typically a limited number of sessions you could receive, and the therapist needed to give you a diagnosis to qualify for insurance reimbursement. The third was to be on government insurance, which again came with a limited number of sessions and required tons of paperwork to be completed and a diagnosis for reimbursement. Deciding it was time for a fourth option, Stever created the Liberation Institute in 2007 with one office and donated furniture.
Liberation Institute is a grassroots community mental health clinic that doesn’t take government funding or insurance. Instead, it offers services on a sliding scale, asking the people who can afford more to pay higher fees to cover the costs for people who need to spend less. The scale for services ranges from $1 to $100. There are also donation-based groups for people who need community healing and can’t afford the $1. No one is turned away for lack of funds.
In that first year of Liberation Institute, Stever offered supervision to student therapists who agreed to volunteer their time in exchange for supervision and experience. After a few years, licensed therapists and other supervisors joined and helped out so they could also be part of the community he was creating.
Together, people help each other give and receive mental health services. I was so grateful for meeting Stever that day in 2012, mainly because he said I could join him and be a therapist at the Liberation Institute!
I started my pre-licensed training that December. A year later, Stever said there was enough money to pay me a small salary to work full-time helping him run the clinic. He warned me that there would never be much money as the model he created was about people helping people more than people making money, but that I could use the money my clients were paying to help subsidize the lack of funds the organization had to pay a livable salary.
Even though Stever was the Director, he never made much money himself. He always put the needs of the people first instead of ever giving himself a bonus. Since most of our clients paid between the $1 to $20 range, most of the money went to rent and to pay the supervisors. One day Stever said to me, I’m not sure what I’m going to do as I continue to age. I’m in my 60s, and I live in a rent-controlled apartment. At this point, I’m assuming I will have to work until the day I die because I put all my time into this organization. At the end of the day, there isn’t much left over to save for retirement.
A few months later, one of the other practicum students, who also happened to be a violinist for Krishna Dass, invited Stever to a show. Many friends who helped with Ram Dass retreats in Maui were there and told Stever he should come to visit for the next event. So, he did and ended up meeting and connecting with Ram Dass. Ram Dass said he felt such a deep connection to Stever from their first meeting, like the two of them had already known each other for many lifetimes. The two stayed in touch and spoke regularly.
A year later, Liberation Institute was running on its own with Adina Asher as the Clinical Director and me as the Assistant Director. Stever decided he would find an inexpensive apartment and move to Maui to be closer to Ram Dass. He wanted to be there during Dass’s dying process and work from home to keep the Liberation Institute up and running. During that time, Stever also created the Hawaiian Hanuman Temple. Ram Dass told Stever that the temple was destined to be on Maui. When he passed away, Stever established the temple on Ram Dass’s estate and helped create and manage a retreat center around it. This position allows him the space to live comfortably in Hawaii while continuing to do all his heart-centered work, providing therapy, and helping to run the Liberation Institute. Hustling for his heart’s calling rather than hustling for a high income has miraculously provided Stever, now nearly 70 years old, with an ideal lifestyle.
Around the same time, I moved to Portland. Since the work I was doing as the Assistant Director at Liberation Institute could be done remotely, I was able to continue working from home. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the Liberation Institute was one of the only community mental health clinics in San Francisco not to close its doors. Instead, we moved all client sessions online and started seeing more clients than ever before. We were up to seeing 550 clients a week and finally had enough money to
hire more administrative help. Being freed up from the duties of the San Francisco office, I decided it was time to open an office in Portland that August.
I found a beautiful office in Montavilla right across from Academy Theater. I found three graduate students seeking pre-graduate experience committed to helping others. Within the first few months, we had 15 clients receiving mental health therapy weekly who otherwise would not have been able to afford it. In 2021, our team increased to 5 therapists this year, we’ve since expanded to 10! We provide over 75 sliding-scale therapy sessions a week and have multiple support groups that anyone can attend no one is turned away for lack of funds.
Working with Stever for the last 10 years has taught me the importance of working hard to carve my own path and trust in the work of helping others. There seems to be this universal rule: if you commit yourself to helping, you’ll be taken care of in return. In my life, I have continued to heal and not fall back into destructive addictive patterns. I have become involved with other amazing organizations, helping people recover from addiction with ketamine-assisted therapy at Rainfall Medicine and co-creating a psilocybin-assisted training program with a fantastic group of other healing-focused humans called Earth Medicine Center. When we hustle, commit to being of service to others, and trust our hearts to guide us, it’s incredible to see how life turns out.
If you want to learn more about our donation-based support groups or sliding-scale therapy appointments, contact us at: info.pdx@liberationinstitute.org