Community-- the Foundation and the Future of Access Institute

By Bart Magee, Ph.D.

​On December 10, 2025 at the Vita Brevis Club in San Francisco, 200 members of the Access Institute community came together to mark a historic moment in the life of the organization. The evening was organized to recognize my efforts to develop and steward the Institute over the past two decades. My retirement from my role as Executive Director created a moment for us to celebrate our collective achievement and embark together on the next chapter of Access Institute.

Standing in a room filled with people who have shaped Access Institute over the past 23 years, I felt something deeper than gratitude. I felt awe. I wished I could have thanked every person individually, because so many have contributed, often in more than one role, to what Access Institute has become. Friends and family, board members, donors, volunteers, artists, faculty, supervisors, community partners, staff, trainees, alumni: none of these contributions stand alone. Each effort has been multiplied through the collective. That is the power of community, and it is the real secret behind Access Institute’s success.

“Community” is a word that gets used so often it can lose its meaning. For me, community is not a vague abstraction. It is a real experience of fellowship, created through shared values, common goals, and collaborative work. It is the experience of thinking together, creating together, and making meaning together. Working at the community level is driven not by one’s individual needs but by the desire to have an impact on the world beyond the self, a generative and social drive. We do find personal satisfaction and growth through those efforts, but the real meaning is experienced in relationship to others and to the social world.  
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Access Institute itself was born in community. Around the year 2000, I was a member of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, a professional organization that offered not just coursework, but mentorship, dialogue, and social connection. As an early career clinician, I was fortunate to be welcomed into such a vibrant and thoughtful organization. It was there, in conversations among colleagues, that we began grappling with the tragic closure of community clinics and training programs across San Francisco. Patients were losing care. Mental health interns were losing in-depth training. Senior clinicians were losing opportunities to teach and give back. Out of those conversations—and the shared sense that something essential was being lost—Access Institute began to take shape. Our founding board and initial volunteers reflected that same network: professional colleagues, trusted friends, people bound by a shared desire to make a difference.

​My faith in community, however, goes back even further. During the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, I volunteered with the Shanti Project, supporting people who were facing illness, loss of support, profound social stigma, and death. The outpouring of care I witnessed during those years, and the way the people of San Francisco mobilized to meet an overwhelming crisis, changed me. It is what inspired me to become a psychologist. That experience convinced me that community-based efforts, grounded in compassion and action, could meet even the most daunting challenges. That belief gave me confidence that Access Institute could succeed and that building a vibrant community would be the key.

In order to succeed we had to become a community of action. No one was going to build this for us. We had to enact what we believed, through building an institution where care would be accessible, where we would connect with and show up for underserved communities, though a training program where psychoanalytically-grounded and socially-conscious training would meet the needs of the next generation of professionals and the people they would go on to serve.

Community is also central to how mental health care actually works. Healing does not happen in isolation. It happens through relationships, through commitment and consistency, through deep recognition and support. The same is true for training. You cannot learn or practice clinical work alone. Our trainees rely on a community of mentors and colleagues, multiple minds thinking together. Years later, graduates still tell me not only how essential their training was and how it continues to shape them, but how enduring the bonds remain among their colleagues who trained together. They share a unique sense of community with all those who trained at Access Institute.

The culture that emerged at Access Institute has always mattered deeply to me. Lee Slome, during her time on the board, used to say, “There’s nothing bad about Access Institute.” I love that! Not only because it’s a beautiful sentiment, but because it speaks to something real about the culture at Access Institute—an inclusive, participatory environment, grounded in mutual respect, openness to difference and conflict, collaboration, and importantly, play and shared joy. People move through different roles over time. An alum returns as a supervisor and another joins the staff or board. A board member serves as a supervisor. As former staff member continues as a volunteer. The community sustains itself.

The pandemic made painfully clear how vital it is to be together in vivo. Forced isolation nearly broke many communities, including our own. That is why bringing staff, trainees, and our board back together in person as soon as possible felt so urgent.  Community cannot thrive at a distance.
I could say more about the vital importance of community for Access Institute, but I also want to underscore how essential it is for society in general. A healthy democracy itself depends on it. The framers understood this. They realized that creating checks and balances and co-equal branches of government alone would not be enough. That’s why the Bill of Rights came to be— to foster an engaged citizenry, guard against tyranny and a support a functioning democracy. That’s why the First Amendment establishes the right to freedom of speech and assembly. Authoritarianism cannot take hold where people are actively participating in vibrant, diverse, community-based organizations. In addition, being active in community teaches each of us how to live and work together, messy as that can be, which is another foundation of a democratic society, and one that seems harder to achieve in our increasingly atomized, on-line society. Being in community also offers an antidote to isolation and loneliness, two of the defining mental health challenges of our era.

Strong communities also make it possible to create and sustain institutions. They are like healthy soil, regenerative, fertile, capable of supporting new growth. That is what has allowed Access Institute not only to survive, but to thrive. It is also what makes a leadership transition like this possible. Because of the strength of this community, I can pass the torch with confidence, knowing the work will continue and evolve.
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My hope is that this community stays engaged and that you stay involved, not only with Access Institute, but wherever shared purpose calls you. At this moment in history, community is not optional. It is essential. And together, we have proven what is possible when people come together around shared values, a desire to made a difference, through a culture of inclusion and mutual support.