Charity, not-for-profit, community interest company, cooperative, community group – which one?
These are examples of different legal and management structures that projects/organisations can adopt. They each have their pros and cons. What are the underpinning values of your organisation? What is the turnover of the project likely to be? What might that be in 2 years’ time, 5 years’ time etc.? How much autonomy do you want to retain if you are the founder of the project/organisation? How much responsibility (and power) do other people want to have in the project? Are you going to employ anyone? What decision-making processes do you want to use? Where and with whom does the ultimate accountability lie? How will you manage disagreements, complaints, conflict etc. in the organisation
These questions may not fire you up when you are thinking about setting up a social action project. But they are significant, and they inform the type of organisational structure you choose to adopt. This is what we will be discussing in our fourth conversation. These questions need careful attention if the project or organisation is going to survive and make an impact.
Course Content
Presenter
After qualifying as a psychotherapist, Beverley Costa set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters, in 2010 she established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum and founded The Pásalo Project in 2017 www.pasaloproject.org to disseminate learning from Mothertongue.
She has trained over 5,000 therapists for NHS services and NGOs, in working therapeutically across languages and with interpreters since 2013. She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading.
In 2020, Pásalo created an e-learning resource for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Social Response Cycle – about effective therapeutically framed social action.
https://www.bacp.co.uk/cpd/social-response-cycle-member-resource/
In the same year (2020), The Paul Hamlyn Foundation awarded The Pásalo Project funding through its Ideas and Pioneers programme to create a free e-learning resource on mental health and multilingualism https://www.pasaloproject.org/multilingualism-mental-health-and-psychological-therapy—course-content.html .
She has run Reflective Practice Support groups for interpreters, psychological therapists and counsellors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and psychosocial workers. She has developed an introductory course in facilitator skills for running Reflective Practice Groups which has been delivered online to organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and Belgium. She is the author of Other Tongues -psychological therapies in a multilingual world https://tinyurl.com/Other-Tongues
