Clinical Director

Salary: $125,000–$155,000

Location:

On-site, Loyola House, Guelph, Ontario

Start date:

Prior to September 1, 2026
Closing date:
June 22, 2026

Eli's Place Residential Treatment and Transition Centre ("Eli's Place") exists because Ontario's mental health system, built around short stays, institutional settings and crisis response, cannot currently offer young adults with serious mental illness what they actually need — sustained recovery, resilience and the life and work skills to move forward. We are building something different. Canada's first long-term rural residential therapeutic community, where time, meaningful work and community life are the conditions for recovery.

Eli's Place will provide long-term residential care for young adults aged 18 to 35 living with serious mental illness, on a 600-acre farm and conservation property north of Guelph. Guests live and work together as a therapeutic community, combining individualized clinical treatment with structured, meaningful work in horticulture, conservation and land stewardship.

The Clinical Director will be a founding member of the leadership team, playing a central role in establishing a model of care that does not yet exist in Ontario. This is an opportunity to make a lasting difference — for the young adults Eli's Place serves and for how the mental health system responds to serious mental illness in this province.

Eli's Place is pre-operational and on track to open in fall 2026. Founded over a decade ago by a family with lived experience of serious mental illness, the organization has spent years developing its model, securing its location, and building the board, partnerships and funding foundation needed to launch. The Clinical Director will join the founding team this summer, contributing to clinical team building and program development in the months before opening.

If this is the kind of work you have been looking for, we want to hear from you.

Eli's Place is a non‑profit organization providing long‑term residential care for young adults aged 18 to 35 living with serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder and major depression. The program is not of a fixed duration, but responds to the therapeutic needs of each individual Guest. We anticipate that, on average, this will involve residential care of approximately six to nine months, integrating individualized clinical treatment, structured meaningful work and community living within a therapeutic community model.

This is followed by several months of support for Guests as they transition out of Eli's Place into housing, education and work.

The program is built on the Gould Farm model, a 113‑year‑old residential therapeutic community on a working farm in rural Massachusetts with a strong evidence base and documented long‑term outcomes. Gould Farm was selected as the Eli's Place program reference following a global review of 33 comparable centres.

Eli's Place was founded by David and Deborah Cooper following the death of their son Eli Nathan Cooper in 2010, after a long struggle with serious mental illness. In their grief, the Coopers committed to building what Eli himself said he needed — a place where people living with serious mental illness could find time, community and meaningful work, especially on the land in a natural setting, as the foundation for recovery.

That commitment has driven the organization for over a decade. It is the reason Eli's Place exists and the reason it matters.

The right person for this role recognizes that recovery happens through sustained relationships and community belonging — not through treatment alone. They are drawn to a model that reflects that, and ready for the responsibility of leading its clinical implementation.

The Clinical Director is the most senior clinical role at Eli's Place and a core member of the organizational leadership team. The role reports to the Executive Director and carries full clinical leadership responsibility for the program.

At opening, the clinical team will include a Nurse Practitioner, a complement of Clinicians across disciplines and a consulting…