JAMIE MUNKS

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GLENS FALLS -- For five holistic therapy practitioners, collaborating, not competing, is the key to strengthening their individual businesses.

The five practitioners, whose businesses make up the Healing Arts Community, recently moved their independent but linked practices together to a suite at 33 Park St., offering massage therapy, reiki and psychotherapy under one roof.

“With this model, it’s a way for our small, independent businesses to thrive,” said Dave LaPointe, whose practice is called Riverwing Healing Arts. “It’s certainly more challenging on our own. I think all of us had a sense that we wanted to be part of a community of practitioners.”

The business cooperative allows each of the individual practitioners to share costs of certain things, such as marketing, which would be much more expensive to fund alone, LaPointe said.

LaPointe and four other practitioners moved in December to the suite in downtown Glens Falls from their previous location at the Shirt Factory on Lawrence Street. LaPointe, Jaime Glendening Robinson and Teri Morrissey White are all licensed massage therapists, while Carrie Morrill-Cummins is a licensed social worker who has an integrative psychotherapy practice and Donna Bassett is a reiki practitioner. The Healing Arts Community suite still has one empty room, and the practitioners are seeking other alternative health care providers to become members of the group.

Some of the therapies the practices offer include sports massage, and target the needs of people who are recovering from surgery, an injury, long-term pain issues or some sort of trauma.

The practitioners share some of their clients and may cross-refer them to one of the other practices. Psychotherapy clients dealing with past traumatic experience or abuse can often benefit from massage therapy, too Morrill-Cummins said.

“What’s common between the practices is the focus on healing,” she said.

LaPointe said he could see the Healing Arts Community contributing to a health services district that has been proposed for downtown Glens Falls as part of a push for health care-related development in the city’s downtown vision and development strategy.

“I think it’s a great, natural idea,” LaPointe said. “There are so many different things offered here, from the hospital to places that focus on something specific like radiology. I think it’s important to learn about and understand these things so if something is out of the scope of what we do here, we know where to send them. And as the health district grows, it will be visible to people outside of Glens Falls who are looking for care.”

The Healing Arts Community will hold an open house next month, with the public invited in to learn more about its services.

“I think as we meet more of our neighbors, it will become clear what the years here will mean for us, how we’ll fit downtown and we’ll find out what the need of the folks here are — the busy professionals who are conducting business and the people who are living downtown.”