Celebrating Christine Leone and Her Impact at CCC
If an organization is lucky, they happen to hire a person who elevates the culture simply by how they show up: with honesty, courage, and genuine care for humanity.
Christine Leone is one such rare person. And Chicago Compass Counseling was fortunate to be that organization. When she began as a staff therapist in February 2022, I couldn’t have imagined how profoundly she would shape our team over the next three years.
In the new year, Christine will begin a new role at Loyola University’s Student Wellness Center, where she’ll bring these same strengths to their community. I can speak for our whole team in saying we’re incredibly proud of her next step. We’re also deeply grateful for the impact she’s had at CCC. She leaves this practice stronger and more aligned than when she joined us.
As we say both farewell and congratulations, I want to honor what Christine contributed and how she supported our resilience through a significant period of change.
The range of Christine’s gifts
As a therapist, Christine is a gifted provider. Over the years, many clients have shared positive feedback with me about her work.
As a group facilitator, she leads with integrity. She protects time for reflection and invites us to slow down; in doing so, she supports a group in attending to shared wisdom that is emerging. She understands how trust is built through careful pacing and ongoing consent, and what it takes for a group to be safe enough for people to show up authentically.
As a clinical supervisor and consultant, she thoughtfully supports clinicians across experience levels, from interns to new clinicians to seasoned practitioners. Her feedback is direct, thoughtful, and grounded in developmental capacity. She supports people in growing and changing while staying anchored in client wellbeing.
A courageous speaker of truth
Christine has been a mentor for our organizational leadership, stepping into this formally in 2024. As our Organizational Culture Mentor, she helped me and others see our reality more clearly, including the gaps between our stated values and our lived practices.
What began as weekly conversations to help me sort through a complicated period at CCC became something essential: a grounded space where hard questions could be asked and integrity could stay at the center.
Christine has a rare gift. She can name what isn’t working with curiosity and care, and she asks the questions that open the door to what could be different.
Too often, organizations protect themselves in ways that quietly compromise trust and functioning. Christine supported everyone on our team, but especially me as the practice owner, in getting clear on where we needed more accountability. She helped me hold myself accountable before I could hold anyone else accountable. Hers is the kind of leadership that changes an organization from the inside out.
This work takes real courage. In 2025, our team faced the disorienting process of coming to terms with serious misalignment and breaches of trust connected to past leadership decisions that needed to change.
Redefining our values, together
In 2025, we made necessary, overdue structural changes. After that kind of shift, we didn’t just need plans. We needed to reconnect to why we do this work, and why we choose to do it together.
I remember when we were planning a retreat in May and frantically packing our agenda. What we actually needed was to recalibrate together. Christine called on us to get grounded in what really mattered: our values and why we do what we do. That reframe helped us slow down enough to create an intentional retreat where we got what we needed as a team.
Christine then guided our entire team through a deliberate values discernment process, creating space for listening, refining, and returning to what mattered most.
It was deep, meaningful work. We spoke from lived experience. We witnessed one another. We shared hard truths. And we did it with growing trust, grounded in a shared commitment to integrity in how we relate to our clients, ourselves, and our community.
Throughout it all, Christine modeled how to meet complexity with curiosity. She invited us to stay present with discomfort long enough to learn from it, and to stay connected to each other while we did.
Values that guide our next chapter
Through this shared process, the team named three values that now guide our direction:
Right Relationship. Liberatory Values. Accountability.
For the first time in CCC’s existence, these values weren’t handed down by me. They emerged from our collective. Christine made sure of that. She helped us attend to the health of the team and trust the wisdom in the room.
The result is a more resilient framework that reflects who we are and what we’re choosing moving into 2026 and beyond. We are a small team where each of us can genuinely say that we care about each other. That is possible because we continue to choose depth over growth, and sustainability over profit-driven productivity metrics.
What does that mean for our future? We aren’t planning to scale and grow. We aren’t planning to sell to private equity. There are many places where that is already happening, and this is what makes us different.
Beyond that, we aren’t trying to be a replacement community, or pretend we are “family.” We have always understood that work is work. And yet, at the end of 2025, we can say that we are restored in our clarity about what that means.
We are, instead, renewed in our commitment to remaining an intentionally small, boutique practice where seasoned clinicians can do meaningful work long-term in an organization that promotes workplace dignity. We love our windowed office overlooking the river and lake, but more than that, we enjoy being able to work in a place where we can share the beauty and challenge of healing work among people we know and respect.
Because we believe the best clinical work is possible when we operate from a place that promotes wellbeing for ourselves, our clients, and our community.
A lasting impact
Today, we are in a place of restored clarity and renewal in large part because Christine helped show us the way.
“Working here has been a transformational experience for me and my development as a clinician and leader,” Christine recently shared, reflecting on her time at CCC.
We feel the same. Our team is so grateful for the ways her leadership supported repair, resilience, and decisions that sustain this important work.
Christine, thank you. You are leaving CCC in a better place than when you arrived. Your impact will keep shaping how we care for ourselves, each other, our clients, and our community, with real accountability to what we say we value most.
Here’s to Christine, and to everyone who will have the privilege of working with her in this next chapter. We’re excited to see the impact of her gifts at Loyola and beyond. Please join me in celebrating her incredible tenure with us.
With deep appreciation and respect,
Sarah Suzuki, LCSW, CRADC
Founder & Owner, Chicago Compass Counseling
