Director: Arbours Crisis Centre

 A Unique and Important Opportunity

 
The current Director of the Arbours Crisis Centre (whose archives are held at the Archive and Study Centre) will retire in January 2009. Consequently, the Crisis Centre (CC) is seeking to appoint a new, creative and dynamic Director to begin any time after January 2008. Interested persons should contact the Crisis Centre directly at info@arbourscentre.org.uk with a copy to Dr. Joseph Berke at jhberke@aol.com, or see the Crisis Centre website at www.arbourscentre.org.uk.

 

 Job Description:

 Job Title:       Director

 Hours:            17.5

 Employment Basis:            Schedule D

 Reports to:     Arbours Housing Association (AHA) Management Committee

 Accountable to:  AHA Board of Trustees and Management Committee.

 Overall Description

 
The Director will hold responsibility for, direct and supervise all aspects of the Centre’s work. In general, he or she will be responsible for representing and holding together the heart and soul of the Centre as a radical alternative to conventional psychiatric care. He or she will:

1)  Contain and carry and the anxieties and feelings of both staff and guests

2)  Have great expertise in working with borderline and psychotic guests

3)  Have an extensive network of friends and colleagues who can support the Centre on all levels, clinical and practical

4)  Ensure the survival of the Centre as a PsychoSocial facility

Managerial responsibilities:

 1. To sit on the AHA Management Committee, and together with the Centre Manager to ensure that the appropriate information is communicated to the Management Committee as required.

2. To attend AHA Board of Trustees meetings, and together with the Centre Manager to ensure that the appropriate information is communicated to the Trustees as required.

3.  To be responsible for ensuring, in conjunction with the Centre Manager, the appropriate supervision and support of all staff and students involved in the work of the Centre.

4.To ensure, together with the Centre Manager, appropriate levels of clinical cover at all times.

 CSCI

1. Be the responsible person for the Crisis Centre

2. To ensure, in liaison with the Centre Manager, that the standards of treatment and care of guests are maintained according to the requirements of the CSCI (including the appropriate keeping of medical and clinical records, the fulfilment of care plans and contracts with purchasers and working within the AHA’s business plan)

3. Be available to liaise with CSCI Inspector

 

Clinical responsibilities:

2. Supervise the work of the Team Leaders, Art Therapist and Movement Therapist through the Wednesday clinical meetings, clinical seminars and individual supervision.

3. Supervise the work of the Resident Therapists through the Wednesday clinical meetings, clinical seminars and group supervision. Maintain a good working relationship with the Consultant supervising the Residential Therapists (RTs)

4. Ensure that the cover staff  and students on placement are adequately supervised.

5. Maintain a good working relationship with the Clinical Consultant, at present Paul Williams, to develop and expand the clinical work of the Centre.

6. Maintain a good working relationship with the Consultant Psychiatrist covering the Centre.

7. Maintain a good working relationship with the Centre GP, Dr. Wardle and her practice.

8. Help to organise and chair the bi-yearly clinical conferences.

9. Promote and maintain the Journal of the Crisis Centre

10. Promote and maintain clinical standards of the CC.

11. Promote Follow-up Research Project on work of the Centre

Liaison:

 1. To liase with other clinicians regarding the work of the Centre.

2. To liase with the Centre Manager, Consultant Psychiatrist, and Nurse regarding nursing and medication matters.

3. To liase with other professionals regarding clinical matters pertaining to the work of the Centre.

Promotional Responsibilities

1. To promote the clinical work of the Crisis Centre in appropriate forums, attending various conferences as appropriate

2. To write about the work of the Centre for publication, encourage and supervise the staff at the CC to write about and generally publicise the work of the CC.

3. Support and encourage the general dissemination of the work of the Centre through the Media.

4. Help organise and chair the yearly Professional Advisory Committee meeting

5. Promote and encourage fund raising for the Centre from individuals, trusts, companies, and any other means.

6. Liase with other professional and public bodies to promote referrals to the Centre

7. Arrange for appropriate advertising to promote referrals to the Centre

8. Help organise and maintain the CC website or ensure that this is done

 

Desired Qualities or Characteristics of Future Director

Provide strong, inspiring leadership at the Centre

Be deeply committed to a psychodynamic, social dynamic approach to helping people in emotional distress  ( as opposed to medical-biological framework)

Be interested in working with, and be compassionate to, severely emotionally disabled     individuals and families

Be deeply committed to the continuation of the Centre as a psycho-social facility.

Be interested in developing and expanding the CC project, and contribute to this happening

Bring their own dynamic, creative vision to an established and internationally respected psychosocial project

 

Suggested Remuneration Package

Self Employed, Schedule D

£65,000 / year pro rata

£5,000 expenses allocation

6 weeks holiday

 

Interested persons should contact

 info@arbourscentre.org.uk with a copy to Dr. Joseph Berke  jhberke@aol.com

VISITORS' COMMENTS

The group which used the P.E.T.T.'s conference and meeting facilities last weekend left the following comments in the Visitor's Book:





What a pleasure to read.

Therapeutic Living with Other People’s Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care, c.1930 - c.1990

An integrated oral history, archive, Internet-based, and person-to-person approach to gathering, preserving and sharing a neglected aspect of the nation's industrial, cultural and social heritage.

This is a project which is to be led and guided by former children and young people from residential therapeutic environments. It will involve them, together with former staff, family and friends, as interviewees, as interviewers, and to help carry the project forward generally.

1. The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre is the only archive facility in Britain devoted to gathering, protecting, and making available the national heritage related to residential therapeutic environments for children and young people.

2. The Archive and Study Centre, founded in 1989, is seeking funding to carry out a major oral history-centred project relating to life and work in therapeutic residential environments for deprived, disturbed and delinquent children and young people between about 1930 and 1990. It will involve a web-site in which audio, visual and documentary materials are brought together to tell the story of residential therapeutic child care generally through this period, with more detailed concentration on six therapeutic communities for children and young people, the archives of which are held in the Archive and Study Centre. New archive material will be sought, and one of the aims of the project will be to create a model for online presentation which can be replicated for other therapeutic environments.

3. The project will concentrate its attention on the period from the early 1940s, when the national evacuation scheme led to the creation of a new generation of experimental therapeutic hostels for difficult-to-billet children across Britain, to the early 1980s, by which time most of the early pioneering figures had either died or retired and many of the pioneering institutions had closed or changed nature and direction. Those institutions which retained their pioneering roots and ethos had either begun or were about to begin a rapid adaptation to meet the radical demands and challenges of new social, economic, and cultural conditions, which included new and rapidly changing legislation and regulation, and the changing public perception of childhood, vulnerable children, and the residential approach to working with them.

4. Although largely unacknowledged, many of these changes were a consequence of the contribution which therapeutic residential environments made during this formative forty year period in the history of the nation\'s relationship and response to vulnerable, disturbed and delinquent children. During this period workers for children in therapeutic community environments forged a new body of professional knowledge and understanding, established new organisations, shaped and informed new legislation, and fundamentally helped to change the nation's approach to child care practice and training. Much that is common sense and even part of legislation today was trialled and proven in residential therapeutic environments then; and much that was common sense at the time was shown to be inadequate for the task in hand, and in some cases actively damaging.

5. This is an immensely influential and fundamentally important area of the nation's heritage, but it mirrors, in relation to the national heritage, the marginalisation and social exclusion often suffered by the children and young people themselves. It is characterised by the invisibility, by the inaccessibility, and by the destruction and loss of records, of memory, and of objects of memory relating to the children and the places and people who looked after them, as well as of the wider work itself. It has, in a sense, fallen out of the national heritage.

6. This absence, loss and destruction of memory and heritage is reflected in the lives and memories of many of those children and young people themselves, who, as adults - and however creative and productive their lives may have become - retain a part of themselves which does not belong to the mainstream community around them, or have a safe and valued place in the wider heritage. In the absence of memory by, about, and for them, their personal histories remain hidden, or protected, or simply unspoken, unknown and unarticulated; but in any event detached from the mainstream history and heritage of the community.

7. It goes beyond this, however, and here the project can play a particular role. For many former children and young people the loss, invisibility, and inaccessibility of records about them, of people who remember them, and of significant places in which they lived, translates into a corresponding lack of personal foundation and certainty about themselves and who they are. In the absence of being remembered, and enjoying an ongoing dialogue with familiar objects, places and people from key stages in childhood, they have a lack, to some degree and at some level, of a coherent and connected understanding of their own place within the scheme of things, or even a firm understanding and knowledge that they have such a place. Once again, through lack of certainty and belief in their own personal heritage and its value, and the ability or opportunity to experience, articulate and share it, they are effectively excluded and estranged from full and confident membership in the heritage of the nation as a whole; and whatever they may have given back in their lives, it remains difficult for them to feel entirely as if they belong, and as if the riches of the nation's heritage truly belong to them as they do to others.

8. As currently conceived, the core project will cover three years, and involve a full-time oral historian, a full time archivist/support officer, and a full-time digital and web environment officer, with the support of current Planned Environment Therapy Trust staff, as well as volunteers.

9. Alongside new and innovative use of Internet resources, we will be seeking other creative and effective ways to share more widely the heritage which the project gathers. One suggestion has been to arrange visits of former children – men and women with a long experience of life beyond the therapeutic environment – to current therapeutic environments, to share if appropriate their experiences and memories with current staff and children. Another has been to create a theatre piece or pieces, which could be taken to current therapeutic environments and other accessible performance venues. Another would be a computer-based travelling exhibition, which could go into current therapeutic environments, for use and input by staff and children. Solutions to communication is one of the functions of the project.

WHO CARED?
ORAL HISTORY, CARING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS

Marking 60 years of the National Health Service

 

Oral History Society Annual Conference
In association with the Centre for the History of Medicine,

University of Birmingham

To be held at the University of Birmingham Medical School

4-5 July 2008

 

We are keen to encourage presentations from those using oral history in understanding health care relationships in the histories of medicine; illness; well-being; disability; and planned environments.

 

We particularly welcome papers that further our understanding of the experience of formal and informal caring in community and institutional settings and amongst professionals, the cared for, carers and kin.

 

Our themes will include:

 

• Witnessing the impact of, and challenges to, medical knowledge;
• Power, humour, emotion, loss, resistance and changes in care relationships;
• The making of ‘expert patients’;
• Emerging counter-knowledge and complementary and alternative therapies;
• The health/social care interface;
• The relationship between oral history and the histories of medicine, health and illness.

 

Abstracts (200 words) should be submitted by 18 January 2008 to Belinda Waterman, Department of History, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ.

Teresa von Sommaruga Howard and Russian workers feature in latest addition to the RadioTC International Series, "Who's Dropped in to the Archive and Study Centre?"

Archivist Craig Fees took advantage of the recent joint Mulberry Bush Training/PETT residential course to interview MASHA PICHUGINA  and MARIA KRIVENKOVA. Twenty-two year old Masha grew up in Kitezh - the eco-village/therapeutic community established in Russia in 1992 to live and work with orphaned, abused and abandoned children - and is now head of Kitezh's new sister therapeutic community, Orion.  Maria is a teacher and foster mother in Kitezh. The 14 minute interview in English and Russian describes their experience, and invites volunteers to come and help to build and support the communities. The Kitezh web-site is www.kitezh.org. To listen to the interview, click here.

TERESA von SOMMARUGA HOWARD conducted the large groups, and took time from the Mulberry Bush Training/Planned Environment Therapy Trust residential course "A Living Learning Experience - An Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care" to record a frank and intimate interview about her life and career: A life and career which has included "therapeutic community outside the therapeutic community" work in a London "sink" estate, turning environment and relationships around as a local authority architect; childhood emigration to New Zealand, with a German refugee father and English mother; a staff team consultancy at the Henderson Hospital as a group analyst, bridging the transition from Stuart Whiteley to Kingsley Norton as the Hospital's Director; and a road of personal discovery, over a landscape blown apart by two world wars over several continents. And much more. Recorded live in the Archivist's office, to listen to her interview, click here.

Earlier Drop-ins

Earlier "Drop-ins" have included MIKE PEGG, Director of the Richmond Fellowship's Lancaster House therapeutic community in the early 1970s, now a successful Mentor to major corporations (Sony, Microsoft/MSN - see his blog at http://thestrengthsway.blogspot.com/);  JANICE JONES, Executive Officer of the Australasian Therapeutic Communities Association (ATCA); and DR. TONY REES, co-author of the iconic Aitken, Webster and Rees (1958), "Magnetic Prospecting", Antiquity 32, pp. 270-271, and (incidentally) donor of the archives of Frank Mathews and of the Birmingham Society for the Care of Invalid and Nervous Children. For a full list of Drop-ins, go to http://www.tc-of.org.uk/wiki/index.php/P3S0

"A Living Learning Experience -An Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care"

First Mulberry Bush Training/PETT residential workshop, September 27-29, a  success!

Course Leader Linnet McMahon writes:

"We have just come to the end of our joint first residential workshop at PETT, 'Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care - a living learning experience', which went extremely well.  It was oversubscribed and we had 16 participants who were from a wide range of private and statutory settings providing residential child care or foster care, including two young Russian women from Kitezh community.

John, Jo and Maureen made sure that everyone felt well looked after and that the event  ran smoothly.  It was so good to have the Library and Archive available for particpants to use, and thanks to Craig for that. The food was excellent - thank you Sheila and everyone. Deborah and Dave led productive sessions on the Child, the Worker and the Organisation, and Teresa provided the Experiential Group.  Many found the whole programme a new and strange experience, and had many initial doubts...However all stuck with it and  I think the 'bottom line' realisation was that 'therapeutic' is not something weird and added on but about how you manage the work of the day. "