NEW ROCHELLE, NY – a new niche crowdfunding site called Prodana, aims to empower therapists, mental health practitioners, and healers in the Hudson Valley and Upstate New York to focus on helping others and allow the community to pitch in to support their efforts.
Prodana is the first of its kind “pay-it-forward” crowdfunding platform, allowing individuals to create “offerings” with a focus on helping others; recipients of their kindness can then make contributions to help others in turn. The platform only pays out funds raised when acts of kindness are confirmed by the recipients, while also collecting ratings and reviews and reporting them back to the contributors. As a result, a “cycle of generosity” where each user is focused not on themselves, but on helping others.
Prodana’s primary focus is on therapist and mental health practitioners, with the recognition that there is an unprecedented need for emotional support worldwide, as a result of the pandemic and its multiple mental health repercussions. Prodana aims to break the transactional nature of conventional therapy whereby a person typically pays per session. Instead, a practitioner can focus on helping others, while allowing beneficiaries to pay as much as they want or are able to, at any point in the future, with the knowledge that their payments will provide others with the same potentially life-changing benefits they themselves have received.
Prodana, from the term “pro bono” and the Buddhist word for generosity, was inspired by meditation centers and programs that are sustained entirely through this pay-it-forward concept. It provides individual practitioners with the technological resources to implement a similar system – collecting single and recurring contributions, transparently display their impact, and maintain ongoing relationships with past beneficiaries and contributors.
Mental health practitioners can structure their entire practice around this pay-it-forward model, or use it to establish a “scholarship fund” where paying clients can make additional contributions to help those less fortunate.
“Our vision is for people to think of their therapist like they do about their Alma Mater’s scholarship program,” says Shalom Tzvi Shore, Prodana’s founder and a practicing hypnotherapist, himself a graduate of Excelsior College in Albany, NY. “A good therapist can change the way you experience the world and the opportunities that are available to you; Prodana allows people to express their gratitude towards their therapeutic experience by helping them reach more people who may not be able to afford it themselves.”
If you’re a mental health practitioner – or anyone looking to focus on giving first and reward second – you can register for a free Prodana account today and start offering your gifts to the world.
