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Why Shift existsShift was started by two people who met on opposite sides of a treatment program: one who had been through twelve of them and one who ran the thirteenth. What worked was not a curriculum. It was being heard, and being held accountable, by someone who did both at once. Everything here is an attempt to make that reproducible.
Two sentences we can be held to. Everything below is the reason they read the way they do.
Our vision
Care that comes to the person, instead of asking them to disappear to deserve it.
A version of behavioral health where nobody has to leave their job, their family, or their own life to get well, and nobody has to earn the right to be heard first.
Our mission
Deliver licensed virtual outpatient treatment for substance use and co-occurring mental health, built around the relationship first, held to real accountability, and measured to see whether it actually worked.
Licensed by California DHCS under certification 191663AP. Delivered by secure video. Clinically directed by our Medical Director.
Read the mission and vision in full, with the six principles
I went to my first treatment center at fifteen. By twenty-four I had been to more than twelve. Eight years of my life. One of them held me for three of those years.
What I remember is not the curriculum. It is the feeling of not being heard. Plans were made about me before anyone asked what my life had actually been. I was told what my problem was and what my future looked like by people who had known me for an afternoon. I felt lost and I felt disconnected, and in a lot of those places I did not feel much compassion either. My voice did not count in my own treatment.
Then I met Cainan. He listened. He took me in. He did not have a script ready for me, he had time. He held me to a standard and he did it without making me small. That is it. That is the thing that got me sober, and it is the thing almost none of those twelve programs had.
The bond was the treatment. Everything we have built since is an attempt to make that reproducible instead of accidental.
The industry that treats teenagers has a name, the troubled teen industry, and it has earned its reputation. Parents call it terrified and out of options. Kids arrive feeling handed off. Almost nothing sits honestly in the middle: a program that keeps the accountability real, keeps the family in the room, and still treats the young person as someone with a story worth hearing and a reason for the way they are.
That gap is why we built Shift's adolescent program. We are the bridge, not a side. We do not take the parent's version as the record and we do not take the teenager's version as the record. We hold both and we work in the space between them, because that space is where the recovery actually has to happen.
Cold care. Programs where the business, not the clinical picture, quietly set the plan. That is what we took the opposite position on from day one. Level of care follows the ASAM assessment. We verify benefits and tell a family what it will cost before they commit to anything. When we are not the right fit, we say so and point somewhere better. Nobody at Shift is paid per referral or per admission.
Some people hear that a person in recovery runs the program and take it less seriously. I have felt that in rooms. My answer is to be more rigorous than the people who doubt it, not less.
I came into behavioral health from technology, and Shift runs on that instinct. Attendance, engagement, level-of-care changes, and completion are tracked and reviewed as data, not left to memory or to whoever spoke last in the meeting. Lived experience tells us what to build. The data tells us whether it worked. We will publish outcomes when we have enough of them to mean something, and not before.
Virtual is not the budget version of this. It is the reason the model reaches anybody. The people who most need this level of care are the ones who cannot vanish for thirty days: the parent with custody, the shift worker with a pension's worth of hours, the kid who cannot lose the school year. Care delivered over video meets them at home, where their life is, and where the recovery has to hold once the program ends.
Not values on a wall. These are the calls we make when the easy answer points the other way.
Modality, curriculum, and setting all matter. None of them work without a person on the other side who is actually listening. We hire, train, and staff for that first.
The recovery has to hold at home, so the treatment happens at home. Virtual is the delivery model that reaches the people who would otherwise never walk through a door.
Structure, attendance, testing, and honest clinical feedback are part of the work. None of it requires making a person small in order to deliver it.
In family and adolescent work there are usually two frightened parties and no neutral ground. We hold the young person's story and the parent's fear at the same time.
Level of care follows the assessment. Benefits verified and cost stated before anyone commits. No compensation tied to referrals or admissions.
Attendance, engagement, level-of-care decisions, and completion are tracked and reviewed. Lived experience tells us what to build. The data tells us whether it worked.
Joshua and Cainan are operators, not licensed clinicians. All clinical care at Shift is directed and supervised by our Medical Director, Oren S. Raphael, MD.
Co-Founder & Chief Executive
Joshua entered treatment for the first time at fifteen and got sober at twenty-four, after more than twelve programs across eight years inside the system he now works to change. He is a New York native and has built his career in California behavioral health since.
Before Shift he worked as a case manager and group facilitator, designing and leading groups for adults in early recovery, and he co-founded The Sober Social Club, which hosts sober social events. He came to this work from technology, and that is the discipline he brings to Shift's operations: level-of-care decisions, attendance, and engagement tracked and reviewed as data rather than as anecdote.
He runs the company: licensing, payer strategy, clinical operations infrastructure, and the build.
Co-Founder
Cainan has spent his career in California behavioral healthcare leadership, designing and scaling outpatient programs that pair clinical rigor and operational discipline with nature, movement, and peer support. He is the person on the other side of the story above: the one who listened, who held the standard, and who did not make it a transaction.
He is the co-founder who put the model into practice before it had a name, and he holds the clinical standard the program is built on. He is also co-founder and Executive Director of Found Recovery in Agoura Hills. Found Recovery and Shift Support Network are separate companies with their own licenses, staff, and accreditation.
Outside work he is a triathlete, runner, and hiker, and is pursuing a private pilot's license.
Growth at Shift means partnerships and access, not sales. Nobody here is paid per referral or per admission.
Head of Growth
Kaela leads growth, partnerships, and referral relationships at Shift. She describes her own work as multidisciplinary: creative strategy, marketing operations, and trauma-informed experience design, built over more than a decade of running cross-functional teams and multichannel programs.
In behavioral health she has spent that time connecting people, providers, and partnerships across the care continuum, and she is the founder of Treatment Tour Collective. Her training sits alongside the commercial work: Integrative Trauma Practitioner II through the Aura Institute, domestic violence prevention certification through WTLC, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction through Mindful Leader.
She owns the number that matters on the growth side: admissions where the benefits were verified before anyone was admitted. She is based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
We are licensed in California, with services live in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania licensure pending. Joint Commission accreditation is in process. Patient testimonials and outcomes data will be published here as those become available with consent. We will not invent them in the meantime.
A short call with a person, not a form response. We answer your questions, verify what your plan actually covers, and tell you plainly whether this is the right level of care.
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