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.
In this first conversation we will talk about how Mothertongue came into being, what enabled it, and the challenges it faced. We will try to make links with the current situation. Are there lessons that have been learned that can apply to today’s social context? How is the current landscape different and what new responses are required?
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
