If we ever needed an actual place called Compassion Fix, with a physical location in Our Town, and a team of therapists and coaches at our avail, the time is now! Guess what? Such a place exists and thrives on our very own State Line Road and 121st Street. In 2017, Ginger Rothhaas founded Compassion Fix as a result of her life and work experiences ranging from management consulting to teaching at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, to attending seminary at the St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. Ginger, herself, is a deeply compassionate person, and she believes so strongly in the power of compassion, that we thought it appropriate to dig into what that really means. 

The definition, according to the Cambridge Dictionary is: Compassion – a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a wish to help them. The Latin roots of the word are: com- and pati, which mean “together” and “to suffer” respectively. (Interesting how suffering together has come to take on the positive connotation of healing together.)

How Ginger arrived at this junction of compassion and business is a bit more complicated. She spent her early career working in business consulting, and as she puts it, her job was to, “Find out how we all get along, how do we see the good in this organization, and how do we embrace this change that I don’t really think I want?” She added, “I don’t think I realized that it was foreshadowing what I would end up doing!” 

Ginger was doing quite a bit of speaking to groups in her career, and she realized it really excited her to be in the teacher role. She accepted an adjunct professor position at Xavier University in Cincinnati, which was where she was based. (She had also met her future husband, Rob, working for the same consulting company, but not in a direct line of report!) “Teaching and watching people learn was a glimpse of what my soul was meant to do.”

At the same time, she and Rob, now married, were going through infertility issues, and Rob was running a family business that could relocate, so they decided to move back to Kansas City to be closer to Ginger’s family, and have a community for the two children they were finally able to have. While she loved Cincinnati and Xavier, it was time to start a different chapter. Now, with two small children in elementary school, Ginger realized that she loved being in school, and thought that was the best way to balance her increasingly restless “mom-brain” with her quest for knowledge and fulfillment. She found an open house being hosted at St. Paul School of Theology on the night of her wedding anniversary and convinced Rob to go with her, and before she knew it, she was enrolled in seminary. (Rob did get dinner and drinks on the Plaza after the open house.)

She loved seminary so much, she stayed an extra year and got a master’s degree in divinity. But, as would continue to be the case in Ginger’s life, there was a crossroad. She had been working in pastoral care for two years and she loved the counseling aspect, but felt that there was something missing. No one was providing a forum for people to have discussions about forgiveness or unconditional love – if someone wanted those discussions outside of a church environment. “I knew that some people were hung up on the idea of not forgiving themselves and were afraid of the ‘indoctrination’ in the church community, and that those ideas couldn’t be questioned. I was having ‘coffee shop’ conversations with friends and I realized there was something here.”

Ginger set up shop in Brookside with a huge dose of self–imposed “imposter syndrome” built in. She wasn’t a licensed therapist, she wasn’t a pastor, although she had the credentials, so she just kept talking to people and researching trauma. She understood that there is a great deal of trauma that some people carry about their church experiences, and hers was the only safe venue for those discussions. In 2017, the shingle was officially hung for Compassion Fix. Over time, the general common thread of everything Ginger did and counseled about was the difficulty of being human. The broadening of her topics led her to broaden her approach, and she dreamed of larger gatherings of people at dining tables with food and fellowship and understanding. That was in March of 2020, so instead, she had to invent her own Zoom groups. 

Slowly she began to “see the magic that happens when a group gathers on a computer screen and shares.” That Zoom group is still happening in 2025 – twice a week. She presents a topic on a Monday, and then on Friday the talking and sharing among the members happens. Whether or not the people in the group change, it still remains the core of her mission – talking, sharing, and compassion. And, the more moms entered the conversation, the more Ginger realized that her outreach needed to include teenagers. The divide was wide enough between teens and parents, but after Covid, the chasm was deep. She opened up her practice to include teens and really fell in love with that aspect of compassion teaching. Now, the challenge became teaching the teens, the moms, and the dads all the same language so that their own dinner tables consisted of recognizable terms and phrases for all to share. 

Next, it was time to build the team. Not an easy decision by any means, it meant Ginger had to share the baby she had built from a germ of an idea and trust other people to represent her deepest desire to spread compassion. “I needed to fill the places I didn’t have in my own life – I hadn’t lost a parent, I needed someone who understood that; I didn’t have an LGBTQ+ person in my family, I needed that open heart in someone.” So, her hiring practices followed her knack for knowing what people need. Her team now includes a licensed professional counselor, someone with a master’s degree in social work, a licensed massage therapist, a certified nutrition coach, and much more. While she had entertained an identity crisis at one point, Ginger now knew that her role, and the roles of those around her, was to be a Compassionist. Just as there are biologists or criminologists, the world needs compassionists. “The brand was just Ginger, but these people on this team are so phenomenal, and I give them the reins, and I’m watching compassion fixes on the team every day.”

What does all of this growth mean for the brand and the daily functioning of the business? According to the website, compassionfix.com, “Compassion Fix offers private counseling and coaching sessions for children, teens, and adults. Sessions are available both online and in-person at our Kansas City location. Online and in-person group workshops and classes are hosted by our team and outside experts. We offer workshops and classes on topics in psychology, creativity, finding purpose, faith, and our list of offerings is growing.” There are online and in-person classes, including The Healing Power of Art, Bridging the Gap, Dear God… WTF?, and Meal Prep Made Simple. 

Besides providing the coaching and the classes, Ginger’s three-pronged approach is to: A) Make people feel seen, heard, and understood, B) Provide them with tools to get to the space where they are seen, heard, understood, and loved, and C) Provide the resources for them to continue to do their own work, which could be a book recommendation, a podcast, a specialist, etc. Her parting words are always this: “You can’t really love other people until you love yourself.” She loves to dream of the idea where Kansas City pioneers the idea of living compassionately and then shares that outward, with the rest of the country. We don’t see any reason why that shouldn’t happen. 

Featured in the March 22, 2025 issue of The Independent
By: Anne Potter Russ