Life By Design, PA, with two offices in Presque Isle and one each in Caribou, Houlton, Fort Kent and Veazie, offers a wide range of mental health and substance abuse treatment/counseling, as well as individual and group counseling and case management services for adults and children.
Life By Design is in its 10th year of operation and boasts 34 full-time and 11 part-time employees.
“In all the areas we are in, there are other providers that clients have the right to choose over us, so we strive to be accommodating, understanding and to serve them to the best of our ability, whether it be the treatment they receive or with filing/billing their insurances,” said accounting specialist Jeff Landeen. “We really strive to enable and empower individuals who seek our help to be able to live their life by design.”
Life By Design has come a long way since being established in 2003. It started out with two providers — Deborah Gray (who serves as the CEO) as a mental health/substance abuse counselor and Phil Jurson as a substance abuse counselor.
“They had a small office in Houlton to see clients and a small office in Presque Isle. Within the next five years, they had grown from a two-person operation into owning a large office building in Houlton, opening an office in Fort Kent and buying out Aroostook Counseling and Evaluation Services in Caribou to have a Caribou office,” Landeen said. “They also expanded their services to include case management services for adults and children.
In the last five years, Life By Design has expanded further into Penobscot County, has purchased a billing/business office in Presque Isle, has purchased a vacant building in Caribou and has renovated it into a modern clinical office and are in the midst of renovating a building in Fort Kent to move their offices into.
Gray expressed “extreme gratefulness” to all the people who have made her dream possible.
“I owe a lot of the success to the great people who we have had the pleasure of employing, both currently and those who have since left,” she said. “Each one of them brought something new, something unique and something valuable to the agency.”
