On a typical fall weekday, Sarah DiSanto is busy. She gets four kids under five ready for school, sits down for a few meetings, and spends the remainder of her day answering emails, resolving insurance issues, and networking for her mental health practice, River Wards Wellness Collective. When Sarah is not communicating with employees, building relationships in the community, or interviewing prospective employees, she is brainstorming strategies for improving River Wards’ culture, benefits, and community offerings and running these ideas by her co-founder, Kara Lacey. She is, by her own description, in the middle of a chapter that is equal parts chaotic and vibrant. Reflecting, DiSanto notes that these experiences have only “helped (her) become a better and more empathetic therapist.”

Sarah DiSanto is a 2026 Main Line Parent Women of Influence Award Winner

Main Line Parent’s Women of Influence Awards celebrate exceptional women making significant impacts in our community. DiSanto was nominated by a close friend and selected based on her achievements and dedication to creating positive change. Each Women of Influence Award Winner has committed to support Family Focus Media’s core values. Together, we are committed to fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment for all families. All backgrounds, races, genders, and sexual orientations are welcome and safe with us.

Beyond the awards, our Women of Influence Luncheon and Speed Networking Night attendees come together as our Women of Influence Network, a community fostering connections, collaboration, and mutual support.

From Playing It Safe to Building Something Bigger

Sarah DiSanto came to this current stage in her professional life honestly, as a mother herself. DiSanto made a conscious leap from stable employment at a managed care company to practice ownership, but this did not happen because she was chasing risk. It happened because she had just become a mother for the first time. This experience made her realize she wanted something a full-time supervisory role could not give her. 

“The motivating factor was needing more autonomy over my life,” she says. By the time she left her previous position, the transition to River Wards was a financially stable one. What shifted was her sense of what she was capable of. “Playing it safe is what has been holding me back,” she says, looking back on years of choosing salaried security over roles that might have fit her better.

DiSanto has grown her Philadelphia-based group practice alongside her business partner, Kara Lacey. What began as two clinicians answering their own phones, scheduling their own clients, and submitting paper insurance claims has grown into a practice with close to 90 therapists.  

River Wards Wellness Collective now has five locations in Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Society Hill, West Chester, and Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The practice offers care for anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, postpartum and perinatal issues, and more, all under one roof, or rather, five roofs. DiSanto’s own therapy practice profile describes her approach. It is built on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, with a particular focus on the transition to parenthood, pregnancy loss, and postpartum anxiety.

Sarah DiSanto Started a Practice and Learned to Lead It

That instinct to move past what felt safe has defined nearly every stage of the practice’s growth. Adding locations meant learning to run a business neither DiSanto nor her co-owner Lacey had been trained to run. “We’re therapists, right? So there’s a lot we don’t know about business,” DiSanto notes. Rather than pretend otherwise, they brought in an attorney, an accountant, and eventually a full leadership team. The women had to get comfortable handing pieces of their vision to people outside the founding partnership. 

It was not always smooth. Building that leadership layer, DiSanto says, meant learning “how to communicate with each other so that we could really hear each other.” There were times these two women who had built something together from scratch did not immediately agree on how to keep growing it. Their partnership grew stronger once they realized that their shared values and mission for the group would always be the driving force in their growth. “We realized in that process how much we truly are aligned in our vision for the company,” DiSanto says.

Some of the hardest lessons came from clinicians and locations that struggled to catch on. They were also challenged by a wave of national telehealth platforms that started competing for therapists with better insurance rates than a small group practice could match. “We decided to lean into what those platforms could not offer: a referral network built on reputation, a strong sense of community, and a workplace that treated therapist growth as part of the job,” DiSanto says. 

“We are still struggling to expand in New Jersey,” she admits, a reminder that even a practice this size has not solved everything. The newer locations found their footing on patience as much as strategy. “Our reputation is so strong in Pennsylvania, that I have faith that it will make it to the right people,” she says.

When Growth Means Letting Go

Growth has also meant confronting a fear that most business owners know well: watching people leave. When a few therapists departed around the same time to open their own private practices, there were worries about what that meant for River Wards’ future. DiSanto re-framed this concern. 

“We consider ourselves to be a learning environment,” DiSanto says. “Your goal might be to go out into private practice, but your goal might also be to stay here and learn, or to become a teacher, become a supervisor or (to take on) a leadership role.” 

Once she stopped putting all the focus on what more she could have done to keep people and started asking what River Wards had given them along the way, the departures read less like a loss and more like proof the model was working. 

“Most of these therapists had always planned on starting their own practices, which meant staying with a group was not in line with their career goals,” she says. “We have always felt grateful to be a part of their journey. We hope we provided a supportive learning environment conducive to building the confidence necessary to take the leap into private practice.”

Making Space for Other Women to Thrive

That philosophy extends well beyond her own staff. DiSanto’s close friend Jennifer Starkie, who nominated her as a 2026 Main Line Parent Woman of Influence, left a teaching career to launch her own private tutoring business. 

DiSanto and Starkie rarely talk shop when they see each other; their friendship runs on more personal ground. But DiSanto has watched Starkie navigate a harder version of the same climb, one that depends on networking and reputation-building rather than the built-in referral pipeline an insurance-based group practice offers. “I have a lot of respect for a business model that focuses on relationship building and marketing to maintain growth,” DiSanto shares. “That’s not easy.” 

It is a small window into how DiSanto mentors. It’s not always through formal programs, but by being visibly present as a friend who listens and who has done the hard thing and is willing to talk honestly about what it required.

How Motherhood Changed the Way Sarah DiSanto Leads

Motherhood has reshaped DiSanto’s leadership just as directly as it reshaped her career path. She had her first child around the time she co-founded River Wards Wellness Collective. DiSanto now has four children, five and under, including twins. She did not expect the twins to change her working hours the way they did. She has had to cut down on networking meetings and delegate insurance-related tasks, a shift she had not planned for and initially resisted. 

What she gained through this experience was a different kind of clarity about the people she leads. “I feel a lot more empathy toward people who might feel overwhelmed, who might feel like there’s a lot on their plate,” she says. “It’s hard to do your best work when you’re not feeling like you have anything left to give.” 

That empathy shows up in how River Wards invests in therapists who need extra training. They now offer parental leave and provide clinical supervision as therapists work towards licensure, decisions DiSanto describes as central to the practice’s reputation for quality care.

At the heart of DiSanto’s story is a partnership she credits again and again with making River Wards possible. She and Kara Lacey started as co-owners doing everything themselves. Today, they lead a company with dozens of employees across two states. But DiSanto is quick to acknowledge that building the practice was never a solo effort. She points to Lacey, as well as their administrator, Jenni Drozdek who helped them move beyond paper billing, as examples of the people who helped turn their vision into a thriving practice. 

“I can’t imagine building a business on my own,” she says. “I have a lot of respect for people who do that, but I couldn’t have done it without my business partner.”

Finding Balance, Honestly

Ask Sarah DiSanto what being named a Woman of Influence means to her in the middle of this particular season, with four small kids at home and a practice still finding its footing in new states, and she does not reach for a polished answer. “I guess it means I must be doing okay in one area of my life,” she says. “You’re always wondering, am I giving enough to each of those roles?” It is an honest answer from someone who has built her career, and much of her practice’s culture, around the idea that nobody has to have it all figured out to begin again. 

Those interested in learning more about River Wards Collective and their services can schedule a complimentary 15-minute phone consultation.

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Follow River Wards Wellness Collective on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can connect with DiSanto via her personal LinkedIn profile as well. 

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