Unpaid Internships

Stepping Stones Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders, Inc. - (Multiple Locations)
Most of the clientele are between 18 months and 22 years of age. With the recent implementation of family and individual therapy in the program, family and individual adult hours will be possible. Clients are located in the South Bay, Peninsula, East Bay and North Bay. Part-time and Full-time intern positions are available on an as needed basis. If you are interested in finding out more about our MFT supervised internship program, please call Jerred Jolin or Roxane Tuason at (650) 357-0571.

San Francisco


California Pacific Medical Center - (San Francisco)
1) Integrative Health Services
Call Kate Rose Kriner at (415) 600-3788 for more info.
This placement is part of CPMC's Institute of Health and Healing. They provide a holistic complementary approach to the treatment of breast cancer in women. They use are, dance and music in a traditional group therapy setting. Co-lead therapy group for women with breast cancer
2) Post-Acute Services
Call Craig Garfinkel the training coordinator at (415) 600-2537 for more info.
The Activities Department at CPMC provides individual and group expressive arts therapy to hospitalized medical patients and their families and caregivers. The average stay at the hospital is two weeks. Please refer to agency file for additional information and how to apply.Great opportunity to work with an Expressive Arts Team, who is actively developing an approach to therapy that includes somatics and the transpersonal.

C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco - (San Francisco)
Their James Goodrich Whitney Clinic is apparently now taking MFT interns for their two-year program. On the website it says they accept only to doctoral students but someone emailed me and said she's heard from two sources that they're taking MFTIs.

Haight Ashbury Psychological Services - (San Francisco)
HAPS has lots of clients and lots of rooms available to use. They are also a practicum site for pre-masters trainees.

Marina Counseling Center - (San Francisco)
This counseling center is in a relatively wealthy part of town and has a good reputation for helping interns get enough clients to move into private practice afterwards. You pay for the first year of training and in your second year you can keep some money from your clients.

New Perspectives Center for Counseling - (San Francisco)
Counseling center that trains you in DBT, Hakomi, EMDR, and expressive arts among others. You pay for training the first year and in your second year you can get money from your clients.


San Francisco Therapy Collective - (San Francisco)
We are offering the opportunity to participate in an exciting and fast growing LGBTQI focused mental health practice, two hours of group supervision a week as well as a small stipend. We are looking for a year commitment and a 10 hour/week time investment, as a minimum.

Seton Medical Center Outpatient Clinic - (Daly City)
Work with acutely mentally ill patients. I've heard they have an internship but I could not find any info on their website. Also, not sure if there's a stipend or not.

Sutter VNA Hospice Bereavement Program - (San Francisco)
Part-time internship doing bereavement counseling with relatives of people who've died in the hospice. Good training. Call Aimee Tomzak at 415-600-0467 if interested in their San Francisco program.

East Bay

Crisis Support Services - (Alameda)
Unpaid internship with the opportunity to work on a crisis line, with seniors, with grief clients, with children in schools, and to lead groups.

Horizons Family Counseling - (Livermore)
Horizons Family Counseling is offering a new, expanded Internship program. We are opening up our Internship to MFT and Social Work Trainees as well as post-graduate Interns. Horizons Family Counseling has been in existence for 37 years. Our agency is in partnership with the Livermore Police Department. We handle crisis situations when needed; we work with families as they face a range of challenges, from a youth who is beyond parental control, running away,
truant, etc., to a first grader encountering socialization issues.

Mythago Child and Family Guidance - (Alameda)
One year training (or longer) for graduate and post graduate students who are placed two days each week in schools in the East Bay. We utilize many approaches in our work with children and are broadly based theoretically. This includes but is not limited to Jungian, Archetypal, Modern/Post-Modern Analytic, Somatic, Transpersonal, Cultural and Sociological points of view. Please send resume and RSVP if interested to Anthony Guarnieri at aguarnieri@ciis.edu

The Pacific Center - (Berkeley)
Primarily working with people in the LGBT community. 20 hours per week.

Native American Health Center - (Oakland)
Native American Health Center is a holistic health care for Native Americans providing medical, mental and substance treatment. Clinical strategies attempt to understand problems from a non-pathological viewpoint. American Indian cultural healing includes prayer, singing, drumming and other spiritual ceremonies. Please see agency file for more information.
Interns perform assessments, psychosocial treatment plans and individual case managment and outpatient counseling. Primary population is Native American. Provide intake assessments, attend trainings and supervision. 10-15 hours per week.

The Psychotherapy Institute - (Berkeley)
A two-year post-masters internship centered around psychodynamic therapy.

We Care Services for Children - (Concord)
They offer a variety of unpaid college internships working with children. Home of the Autism Family Support Project.

North Bay

Community Institute for Psychotherapy - (San Rafael)
Psychodynamically oriented internship requiring two-year commitment. Also a pre-doctoral internship.

Family Service Agency of Marin - (Marin)
15-20 hours/week internship with several different tracks to choose from: child, adult, and family counseling; suicide prevention; childhood trauma pregnancy and early parenting; school-based programs.
Stipend: only for bilingual interns.

Family Works - (Marin)
Training in many different therapy modalities while doing adult, couple, child, family and group psychotherapy.

Hospice of Petaluma - (Petaluma)
Working with children around bereavement/terminal illness.
Review: Great work environment. Very good training and supervision. 9 out of 10.

The International Center for Attitudinal Healing - (Sausalito)
Running groups with children around bereavement, living with illness, hospice work counseling children who are dying.  Very good supervision and training.
Review: 9 out of 10.

Napa Valley Unified School District -- (Napa Valley)

We train students to provide individual and / or group psychotherapy to K-12 students with mild to moderate emotional or behavioral challenges in exchange for training and supervision (individual and group).  It is unpaid, 1-3 days/week, for the duration of the school year (August - June). Trainees can log up to 10 client hours / week, interns up to 20.

Email Pam Walton, MFT at pam_walton@nvusd.org for more information.

South Bay

Adolescent Counseling Services(ACS) - (Palo Alto)
Adolescent Counseling Service’s (ACS) provides school based therapy and substance abuse treatment for teens.

Bay Area Family Therapy Training Associates (BAFTTA)
BAFTTA offers a 9 month long field placement training. Interns provide a wide range of services to local schools in exchange for supervision, consultation and training in narrative therapy.

College of San Mateo Office of Psychological Services - (San Mateo)
Submitted Review: This is a site that is influenced by Rogers and carry on a humanistic tradition. You'd do the internship approximately 10 other interns and have weekly group check-ins and training. You're on site at CSM about 16 hours a week. The trainings are poor but you get a decent diverse caseload, you also get to sign off on at least 5 client hours each week when you're the counselor on call. Contact Makiko Ueda at (650) 574-6125 if interested.

The Community Health Awareness Council - (Mountain View)
CHAC's primary focus is working with kids in the Mountain View and Los Altos area schools.

Youth and Family Enrichment Services - (San Carlos)
Work with youth and families.

Internships with a Stipend or Share of Client Fees

San Francisco

Access Institute
Two year internship training in psychoanalytic therapy or psychotherapy with elders.
Stipend: $6,000/year.

Aids Health Project - (San Francisco)
The counseling internship program provides comprehensive clinical training to mental health students seeking experience in the practice of Brief Psychotherapy and includes training in Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy, couple's work, and group facilitation. Trainees work primarily with gay and bisexual men and address issues including HIV and other health-related concerns, intimacy, gay identity, communication, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. The traineeship requires a 20-hour per week commitment from July though June of the following year. Applications are due in February.
Stipend: $100/month.

Balboa Teen Health Center
Call (415) 469-4512 for the general line.
Balboa Teen Health Center is a free clinic for adolescents, funded by the Department of Public Health. It is located in Balboa Public High School, in the Excelsior district of San Francisco. Clinicians provide individual, family, and group psychotherapy especially around substance abuse and mental health issues.
Stipend depending on experience.

Creative Health Services
Each intern will serve as a Mental Health Consultant in after-school programs at two
SFUSD elementary, middle, or high school sites in San Francisco’s Richmond District.
This internship carries an annual stipend of $3000.
16 hours/week.
Interns can expect to accrue approximately 500 children’s hours towards MFT licensure.
For more information contact Craig Garfinkel, Ph.D.
Director, Creative Health Services
creativehealthservices@gmail.com

Edgewood Center for Children and Families
Edgewood has a number of different internships doing family and child therapy. They generally take applications in the Fall and early Winter. They have no listing of internships on their site but if you contact them and ask human resources they should point you in the right direction.
Stipend: $4,000/year

Holos Institute - (San Francisco and Oakland)
Training in ecopsychology while seeing clients in psychotherapy. You can also facilitate group vision quests and shamanic journeying I think. They rent out blocks of time at their center and you keep some or all of the fees from your clients.

Oak Creek Counseling Center - (San Francisco, Berkeley, Pleasant Hill)
They give you office space to see clients for psychotherapy. You pay for training and supervision and they take a portion of your client fees. You work pretty autonomously.

St. Anthony's Foundation
Internships available doing individual, child, and family therapy. Working with the homeless and those in drug and alcohol rehab among others. Also there's a pre-masters practicum and an expressive arts internship available. You may have to email someone to get the internship description.
Stipend: $1,000 per semester for a second year graduate counseling psychology student or $1,000 per six months for a post-graduate registered MFT intern.

San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center
Part time internship with an adult focus or a child focus. Interns do play therapy or individual therapy, counsel on a parent talk line, and drop in counseling. Has a reputation for providing great training and being a great organization to work for. The website has no mention of the internship so you have to contact someone there.
Stipend: around $300 a month.
Review: "Two thumbs up."

San Francisco Unified School District
Working with K-12 graders in underperforming STAR schools. There are probably other internships within SFUSD but I found their website difficult to navigate.

USF Center for Child and Family Development
Interns act as counselors through the school year in SF/Bay area schools. 1 1/2 to two days a week. 10 client hours a week. Took 1 and a 1/2 school years for one intern to get their hours. I'm not sure if there is a stipend or not. "Quality seems to vary w/school assignment. Quality of group supervision good. Don’t expect good facilities though – being a self-starter valuable. May or may not include family hours."
Review 1: "Recommended: Yes!"
Review 2: "Wasn’t great but had some advantages."
Review 3: "8 out of 10."
Review 4: "Not an ideal container for therapy and little access to families, but a good way to get hours quickly. (7 out of 10)"


East Bay

Alameda Family Services - (Alameda County)
Formerly Xanthos, inc. Non-profit agency puts people in schools in Alameda. Ten hours a week/2 days a week. People who worked at AFS were very helpful. Good supervision. Decent work experience. Flexible, not a lot of requirements.
Stipend: full-time internship is $7,200.
Review: Recommended.

Ann Martin Center - (Piedmont)
Two year part-time or full-time internship doing play therapy with children. Very comprehensive psychoanalytic training and supervision. Lots of writing and reading involved. Has a very good reputation for training solid child therapists. Most of the interns are from doctoral programs but they do accept MFTs.
Stipend: $9/client hour for the first year. $13/client hour for the second year.
Review: "Highly recommended."

Blue Oak Therapy Center - (Berkeley)
The website does not have any information on their internship program but I saw a flier saying interns get paid some for each client hour. You provide brief and long-term psychotherapy and can take clients with you into private practice.

City of Berkeley: Mental Health - (Berkeley)
Two different training programs: a family, youth, and children program and an adult program. I heard it pays but I couldn't dig up any information about whether it paid a living wage or a stipend.

Earth Circles Counseling Center - (Oakland)
Psychotherapy with individuals, couples, groups, families, and children. They have no details about the internship on their site but I was told they do pay something.

Family Paths - (Oakland, Hayward, Fremont)
One year 15-20 hour/week internship/practicum working with children and families.
Stipend: $1250/year for interns, $750/year for trainees.
Review: I'm a trainee there (From the [CIIS] EXA program) and am loving it...I'm continuing on as an intern next year despite the very small stipend! I work with kids, adults, and sometimes families or couples in the TIPS program on an outpatient basis.

Holos Institute - (Oakland and San Francisco)
Training in ecopsychology while seeing clients in psychotherapy. You can also facilitate group vision quests and shamanic journeying I think. They rent out blocks of time at their center and you keep some or all of the fees from your clients.

Horizons Family Counseling - (Livermore)
Horizons Family Counseling is offering a new, expanded Internship program.
We are opening up our Internship to MFT and Social Work Trainees as well as
post-graduate Interns. They are placing Trainees/Interns in the five middle schools in Livermore. They don't say if there's a stipend or not.
Contact: Ileana Soto, MFT and Clinical Supervisor
Livermore, CA 94550
925-371-4747; isoto@ci.livermore.ca.us

The Link to Children - (Oakland)
Two year part-time internship doing play therapy with 0-5 year olds, parent and teacher consultation. Interns are trained in attachment theory, systems theory, behavioral interventions, and cross-cultural competency.
Stipend: $910/month.

Touchstone Counseling Services - (Pleasant Hill) 
Private practice internship with opportunities to work with children, adults, couples, and families.

Women's Therapy Center - (El Cerrito)
A 2-year program training MFTIs and PsyDs in psychodynamic, relational therapy with women. This internship has been recommended by a former employee.

North Bay

Novato Youth Center - (Novato)
Mostly child therapy, a little family work. Poverty/crisis related issues. Mixed white, A-A and latino population. Low income, on site at youth center. (Medi-cal). Dark building. Transpersonal element to training. Pays $15 per client hour.
Review: Supportive wonderful staff. Got almost all hours in that year. 10 client hours a week, 17 hours total. Definitely recommended if living in Marin.

South Bay

Adolescent Counseling Services - (Palo Alto)
Positions in adolescent substance abuse treatment program and an on-campus counseling program.

The Process Therapy Institute - (Los Gatos)
PTI has a mirror training program for which you must pay a monthly fee, and lets you set up your own private practice internship under their auspices. They take a portion of your clients fees and you keep the rest.


Teen and Family Counseling Center - (Campbell)
A part-time practicum and internship site working with teens and children.

Tips on Establishing a Successful Private Practice

Private Practice- Jody Blackley's Experience
An MFT who put up some audio files of some classes she's given on private practice work in California.

Uncommon Practices
A business devoted to helping therapists with marketing, business planning, websites, etc. Several free articles and they say they even give a free assessment of one's private practice strengths and weaknesses.

Be a Wealthy Therapist
This site has several helpful free articles and audio files on marketing and articulating your work to people. There are also classes and individual coaching available as well to members.

The Stress-Less Path to Licensure
Miranda Palmer is an MFT based in Modesto who offers a free study group for those taking the BBS licensure exam as well as a free newsletter helping California interns through the licensing process. She's also available for individual coaching.

Mission Statement

This site was created to contribute to the well-being of MFT trainees and interns. As a current MFT Trainee at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, I found that there were surprisingly few resources that gave a thorough overview of my options for jobs and internships after graduation. I have also become much more concerned about living frugally since payment of my student loans will start soon. On this site, I intend to include resources on finding jobs and internships as well as tips for living on a budget in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ideally, I would like people to contribute their experiences at various organizations and any advice or resources they have come across. I have thought about starting an email list for those who would like to network if the site reaches a certain level of popularity. I’ll be happy to respond to any emails or comments.

Also, although I am focusing primarily on the MFT Intern experience I hope that a lot of these tips and resources will be helpful for our MSW and PhD brothers and sisters.

Money Management

Learning how to manage one's money and becoming financially intelligent is an important part of most people's lives. I've found a few resources to help:

The Simple Dollar
Trent has focused his blog on a variety of topics related to money management: eating cheaply, investing, budgeting, debt management and loads more. He also has a section at the top of his blog called "31 days to fix your finances" which seems loosely based on the extremely influential book Your Money or Your Life.

Wesabe
This is an online program that once you register can automatically track your spending by reading your online bank statements. It also tells you about better deals on credit cards and has a host of features to give you info on how you spend your money.

ClearCheckbook.com
Another online program that you can use to track your spending. You cannot set it up to automatically download info from your bank account so this may be a good choice for those uncomfortable with a website having that kind of access.

Free Therapy Training Online

I've found a couple of interesting sites that offer free trainings for those working the mental health field:

Hypnosis Motivation Institute
This Southern California organization offers a certification program in hypnosis free through their website. I've completed it myself and it entails 6 2-hour videos with a short quiz after each one. Once you've completed the quizzes you make a half-hour phone appointment with a trainer who asks you some final questions and asks you for a demonstration of hypnotic induction. When you pass they send you a certificate saying you are a "certified hypnotist." You must complete the whole process in 30 days which is not that hard to do. They hope that by completing the training you will get interested and pay for more advanced trainings whereby you can become a "certified hypnotherapist" or even further. I found the training videos pretty interesting for the most part. I don't feel comfortable doing hypnosis with my therapy clients but it was interesting to learn a new modality and get a sense of what it would be like to work that way.

Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
This is a web-based learning course for evidence-based TF-CBT with children and adolescents. They give video examples, readings, and quizzes detailing the different stages of the therapy. It would helpful for certain job applications to say you have some experience in TF-CBT as many agencies are looking for evidence-based practices these days.

Using Craigslist to Find Jobs

Craigslist.org can be a good resource to find current jobs especially the rare private practice or small agency job with limited openings. It can be discouraging when you don't know where the jobs postings are and what to search for. I have learned a few important tips in my own search:

1) It's best to use a combination of searching and browsing the "nonprofit" job section to find out what's available.

2) Searching just for "MFTI" or "MFT Intern" misses a lot of jobs.

Many employers don't put "MFT Intern" in their list of qualifications but instead say "MFT license or license eligible" (or "registered with the BBS"). Good search terms are: mft intern, mfti, therapy, psychotherapy, counseling, BBS, license eligible, etc.

2) A lot of postings can be found by browsing the "nonprofit jobs" category.

You have to wade through a lot of jobs that are not relevant to you but this consistently brings up jobs that don't come out in the searches.

3) There are jobs posted in other categories.

One of the best opportunities I found on craigslist was for an MFT psychoanalytic private practice internship that was entered in the therapeutic services section not the jobs section. This is why it's important to do the searches as well as browsing.