Setting up, establishing and maintaining a project can feel overwhelming. We start with a question – should psychological therapists even be doing this sort of work? And if the answer is yes, what do they need to know and how can they learn it? Some of the skills needed for setting up a social action project are within the skills repertoire of trained counsellors and therapists. Some are different.

In this series of conversations about setting up social action projects we discuss a case example. This example is of a registered charity, Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000 – 2018). Mothertongue was a community psychological therapy service which offered free, culturally and linguistically sensitive counselling for people from multi-ethnic communities in their preferred languages.