UKAGP Newsletter - November 2015

Dear <<First Name>>,

The Organising Committee met this month with full attendance of all nine members plus Jen Clayton, our administrator. We were delighted to welcome Adam Smith as secretary and Vicky Eugenio as new committee member to their first meeting. Helen was a generous and welcoming host, and a highlight of our meeting was a delicious lunch with home-grown corn on the cob picked minutes before they were cooked! We covered a full agenda with energy and enthusiastic discussions, and I came away with a real sense of team work and mutual support. Minutes of the committee meeting can be viewed / downloaded so you can see more details about our plans for the coming months.

In September I attended the General Board meetings and the AGM of EAGT in the Hilton in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, the venue for the joint AAGT/EAGT conference next year. It was certainly a new experience to walk out of a meeting for a tea break through the garden and straight into the sea for a refreshing paddle! I imagine it will be a popular option during the conference next year too! Do consider booking to take part in this exciting joint venture.

Please see additional information below regarding the conference scholarship fund, young researcher and workshop proposal deadline. Peer reviewers are also needed for the double blind procedure for workshop proposals and for donations for the Scholarship Fund.

In other news from EAGT, Gianni Francesetti was re-elected as President for one more year when newly elected Beatrix Wimmer will take over. Beatrix is the Vice-President of the Austrian Gestalt association and chair of the Professional Competencies & Qualitative Standards Committee of EAGT.

This edition of our newsletter also features information about upcoming Gestalt conferences in the UK, an important update about our new website, and a round up of news and events across the Gestalt community.

With Warm Wishes,

Jacqui Lichtenstern
Chair, UKAGP

Conferences Update

You should have already received the update explaining the decision to postpone the national conference until 2017. However, you are not short of Gestalt conferences to choose from during 2016. GPTI are taking on the Nottingham booking for their conference 1-3 July. In response to the feedback from our last conference UKAGP will be holding a Community Day and AGM on a Sunday in London, and in addition two Trainee Days, one in London on the Saturday of the same weekend, and one on another Saturday in a venue in the north of England. All dates to be confirmed as soon as possible.

‘The Aesthetic of Otherness: meeting at the boundary in a desensitized world’ on 22-25 September, is a unique opportunity to take part in the co-creation of a joint conference in Sicily, organised by AAGT (Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy) and EAGT (European Association of Gestalt Therapy), two of the largest international associations for Gestalt therapy.

Competencies & Qualitative Standards Committee of EAGT.

Some other headlines – UKAGP is due for Re-Registration of it membership with EAGT by February 2016.A seminar is to be organised for all the Heads of Training Institutes to discuss the Professional Competencies & Qualitative Standards document to explore how it is impacting trainings etc.

Jan Roubal, Chair of the Research Committee reminded us that there are research documents available for us to refer to on the EAGT website.

UKAGP Organisational Sub-Committee / Consultative Group

We are delighted to have received a 100% response from all the contacts we sent the Consultative Group (CG) invitation to. Of these, everyone has come on board with a nominating a delegate, with the one exception of CHPC because they no longer run full trainings, but wish us well with this venture.

We wish to thank all our colleagues for their enthusiasm and support for this exciting venture and for offering delegates from their organisations/associations. We are pleased to welcome Hugh Pidgeon as facilitator of this emerging group. Hugh is a UKAGP member who specialises in the skill of ‘thinking well together’ in his organisational consulting work. Hugh was also one of our plenary speakers at our summer conference.

We are now in the challenging process of trying to find a date that most of the 17 people can make!

Organisation Contact

UKAGP Website Update

Some of you may have noticed that our website is currently out of action. This is due to the launch of our new website which is now in the final stages of completion and being moved to a new server - watch this space for launch day information.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused to members during this transition period. If there's any information you need to access in the meantime please contact admin@ukagp.org.uk and we'll ensure you'll get a copy of whatever you need.

Update from the Secretary

I have been made most welcome in my new role as Secretary. You will see from the minutes of the last Organising Committee that we have made available online that we have given ourselves a comprehensive set of tasks for the coming year.

I have enjoyed getting my teeth into the committee work. My intentions are to clarify the various issues facing the UKAGP through the committee and meeting process, to facilitate discussion and to involve myself in actions to progress our work together.

The issues that immediately come to mind as I write this are to do with setting out our policies and procedures, defining our roles as part of the Organising Committee, and to manage our re-application as the UK’s National Organisation for Gestalt Therapy (NOGT) with the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT).

I am also keen to ensure that the comments and actions that are raised by UKAGP members at the AGM and through our committee meetings are acted upon, resolved or held in a manner that is clearly communicated back to you as part of our responsibility to you as members of our association.

Constitution and Annual General Meeting Feedback.

We now have an updated UKAGP Constitution with amendments agreed at our Annual General Meeting in July this year highlighted in yellow.

This year's AGM minutes are available for you to view or download.

The comments and actions generated from our AGM have been discussed at the October 2015 UKAGP Organising Committee and are in process of being managed and taken forward in a variety of ways. You will see feedback as we act to address our current issues over the coming year. I welcome the opportunity to talk through any issues these documents raise for you as you read through the text. Please do not hesitate to contact me at secretary@ukagp.org.uk.

With Best Wishes,

Adam Smith,
UKAGP Secretary

Timeline Gestalt UK

This project idea was welcomed by our community evidenced by the energy that has been generated in recording our history of associating throughout the decades.

Claire Bartram, Faye Page and I met in June to record the history of Gestalt Association UK and the British Gestalt Society. During our meeting we contacted Peter Philippson for his memories.

The "History of Association" questionnaire was placed on the website with an invitation to members to fill it in whether or not they were attending the conference. At the conference we covered a wall with blank paper and asked participants to write their contribution to the collective memory of what happened when. We had great fun recalling the past with Val Randle, Jenny Colls, Gaie Houston, Toni Gilligan just to mention a few ...

We now have 14 completed questionnaires, each one a piece of history and a story in itself. Do please complete your questionnaire and let us have your story for the archives.

The TIMELINE will be available at future conferences and we hope that this "work in progress" will gather momentum and form a ground for us to appreciate where we have traveled to get to the present.

Thank you for your support,

Fondly, Judy Graham

News and Events

Within the UK Gestalt Community

Call for donations for scholarship program Conference Taormina Sicily 2016

A call to all...

A call for solidarity and social responsibility in our Gestalt community

Many people suffer from the economic crisis, also in our Gestalt community. AAGT and EAGT have created a joint scholarship fund to help remove barriers by enabling colleagues in need of financial assistance to be able to attend the Conference in Taormina.

We call anyone (individual members, Training Institutes, NOGT’s and ‘likers’ of our Facebook page) who are able to support colleagues with less financial resources to donate any amount to the scholarship fund. Please consider to organize fundraising events for our scholarship fund, like mini-trainings or lectures. We hope that our principles of solidarity and social responsibility will also reflect in our own association.

You can directly make a transfer through PayPal to support the EAGT fund.

It is also possible to pay by bank. You can find our bank details on top of this letter. Please mention in the description field ‘collectebus Taormina’. Any amount is welcome!

The scholarship AAGT and EAGT Committee will consider in allocating grants including the following: ethnic diversity, financial need, geographic diversity, membership status, potential conference presenter, as well as unique circumstances. We will also consider specific conference expenses based on travel distance.

Gestalt Reconsidered Creatively - Workshop

Malcolm Parlett’s book has now been published. It builds on earlier papers published in the British Gestalt Journal and gathers together many years of thinking about links between personal development and global challenges in an accessible, beautifully written and incisive way.

This is an invitation to attend a small workshop in January to explore the ideas in this book in relation to our own lives and the communities we are part of. We will be using creative materials as a way of engaging with these ideas personally and collectively, which will lead into facilitated discussion and experiential work over two days.

Copies of the book can be ordered via this link.

The workshop flyer can be downloaded here.

To book a workshop place contact me: mail@christinestevens.co.uk

EAGT Awards for Young Researchers

In order to support research in Gestalt therapy, EAGT announces awards for researchers under 35 years of age.

Candidates will present their research at the EAGT conference in Taormina 2016 in the form of a poster.

The research project description needs to include:

the initial hypothesis or research question
sample/data creation
instruments/methods results
discussion in the context of current research literature

The total length of the project description is limited to 5000 characters including empty spaces (without reference list).

The candidates’ projects will be blind evaluated by independent reviewers.

The accepted proposals will be presented at the conference as aforementioned in the form of a poster (max.120x80cm).

The three best projects will be selected for the EAGT awards. They will be announced and awarded at the EAGT conference in Taormina.

Please send the proposal to: researchaward@ taorminaconference2016.com before November 30th.

We are looking forward to your contributions!

Jan Roubal, EAGT Research Committee chair

MarkReck, AAGT Research Committee chair

2016 Taormina Conference Proposal Submission Extension

Now November 10, 2015

Dear Colleagues,

We have been asked to announce that the deadline for submitting a proposal to the 2016 Taormina conference has been extended to Nov. 10, 2015!

If you want to be a presenter at this unique experiment of EAGT & AAGT please visit our website. You'll find all information there!

Looking forward to see you in Taormina!

Beatrix Wimmer & Bob Witchel
Co-chairs of the EAGT/AAGT publicity group

Gender & Sexual Diversity Interest Group

Dear All,

Our personal and professional experience guided us to start and offer you a new interest group: The Gender & Sexual Diversity AAGT Interest Group (GSD IG).

We hope to create with you a vivid, supportive and inclusive interpersonal space for an in-depth understanding and embracing of different gender and sexual identities:

- trans (transgender, transsexual, cross-dress) identities,
- intersexual identities,
- genderqueer, bigender or agender identities,
- homosexual identities
- bisexual identities,
- asexual identities,
… and many more.

As gender and sexual diversity also expresses itself in the form of different relationship arrangements and a myriad of ways of having sex, this group would also be open to better understanding of such identities, as poly-amorous ones and people with kinky sexual narratives.

We hope that you will find the group helpful not only as a professional but also as a human being.

Professionally, it can be imagined that the field of the group will be able to contain such possible projects like e.g. (1) a Gestalt-based published monograph on GSD issues – an awaited synthesis of what we Gestaltists know about sexuality and gender, or (2) peer-supervision for people from all around the world! As we have free-of-charge access to Ring Central video conference tool, on-line group meetings will be very easy!

Personally, we hope the group will be a safe space for all its members, including members who are GSD. We can imagine common sharing of life experiences among members of the group as an important way of getting support. We hope you feel persuaded to join us. We are ready to welcome you aboard:) Ring Central, a video conference tool will support our regular on-line meetings.

For times between meetings we have equipped you with an on-line platform for the group. It is Wiggio-based which uses a system of invitations, so signing up for the interest group will result in such an invitation. If you have any questions and/or want to join the group, please, contact us at: gsd_ig@aagt.org