Coping with COVID through creative techniques Leanne Pais created The Unopened Box as an Instagram page. Since then, with support from NSRCEL, they have grown to have over 2000 organic followers and run a four-employee revenue generating organisation

The Unopened Box is a mental health organisation that helps people heal patterns of trauma through mental healing services provided by qualified professionals that include but are not limited to therapy, workshops, training, events and community-based initiatives.
The Unopened Box offers coping mechanisms to as many people as possible through creative and innovative techniques.
“Our intention is to help people own, heal and reclaim their story, by pushing boundaries on self-limiting beliefs in a non-judgmental supportive space,” says Leanne Pais, a psychological therapist (Marriage and Family Therapy) with extensive work in Trauma and PTSD aftercare.
“What sets us apart is that we are working to create safe and supportive spaces using our community-based initiatives. We’ve had families come in for therapy and have seen the impact of our transformative healing from the children to the parents. Our entire set-up is based on a client base built almost entirely through word-of-mouth references with an almost 80% referral rate,” she adds.
Leanne says she created The Unopened Box as an Instagram page to provide effective and easy coping mechanisms to people to deal with the Covid-19 mental health issues. “Since then we’ve grown to have over 2000 organic followers and run a four-employee revenue generating organization.”

As an individual, she has a private practice entirely based on word-of-mouth with pan-Indian clients and clients from across the globe that include but are not limited to the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Ukraine, and the UAE. However, the growing crisis led her to want to create more impact and take her method to more people so that they could heal.
Part of the Women Start-up Program at NSRCEL, the entrepreneurial centre at IIM Bangalore, Leanne says NSRCEL has helped shape a dream into a reality. “We moved from an Instagram page to an incorporated organisation. We have a team. We’ve conducted more events, taken on more clients and expanded our scope of work to create a global reach by being recognised by associations from across the world like Atic Dubai and Starts with Youth to name a few. We’ve scaled up from ‘an individual with a dream’ to ‘a venture with a mission’. We have plans to grow further and truly create our own mental health revolution.”
The Unopened Box is brimming with new ideas and more possibilities. “I’ll be forever grateful to Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula, Ankita Pegu and the team of NSRCEL along with my cohort members, team, mentors and all the people who’ve helped us get here,” says Leanne.

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