Background of my work
I have a professional background in psychology, facilitation and wildlife education and over the past two decades I have been pulling together the professional and the personal through my ecotherapy and photographic work. I get so much pleasure from being in nature and I want to enable others to have similar experiences.
My current activities are a blend of running ecotherapy sessions for mental health service users, training mental health professionals, writing and wildlife photography. Looking back over the past 60 plus years I can see various threads that have come together to bring me to this place. Here are some of those threads.
I was appointed as Psychologist Specialising in Ecotherapy to the North East London Foundation Trust in October 2009 and worked with the Trust until June 2011 when the post was axed as part of the NHS cuts. The work involved five main objectives: to run ecotherapy activities in nature for mental health service users; to mentor others who are working for the Trust and who want to use ecotherapy in their work; to collaborate on externally validated research and evaluation with a university; to run training workshops and longer programmes on ecotherapy; and lastly to disseminate the results of our work to a wider audience. In that short time we ran some interesting and successful programmes.For examples click here.
Pioneering use of greenspace for health
Between 2004 and March 2007 I was the THERAPI Project Manager at Thames Chase Community Forest where I managed eleven projects to do with the relationship between people's health and the green environment. Download the summary report here. Costing over half a million pounds it was funded by the Countryside Agency, local authorities and PCTs. The Forestry Commission used THERAPI as one of their national champion case studies of what can be done for improving health by using the green environment, cf their web site here.
I have been an advisor to the Countryside Agency and Natural England, and was funded to create a forum for senior managers in Thames Gateway who are working strategically to integrate the development of health, environment and planning to ensure multifunctional gains. As part of this contract I also organised a regional conference in London on this theme in 2006, the key speaker was Chris Baines. I produced a research review and policy report for the National Community Forests on the health and green environment agenda and lead a conference on this theme in Sheffield early 2007. I am trained in leading conservation groups and in winter 2006-7 I ran my first successful Green Gym type programme (called Fit n' Green) for long term mental health service users in Havering, funded by Capital Volunteering and aimed at engaging service users in mainstream conservation volunteering.
I have been a conference speaker on Ecotherapy on various occasions, for example at UWE in Bristol in February 2007 for the Healthy Communities Research Forum and at the Mind Conference on Ecotherapy in 2008.
Psychology, Counselling, Facilitation
I worked for many years as a psychology lecturer and freelance management development consultant in communications and conflict resolution. I am trained and have practiced in counselling and group facilitation. I have also worked as a consultant supporting organisations managing change to sustainable business, and lectured at Brunel University on sustainable development. I co-lead my first three day ecotherapy workshop in 1992 for trainee therapists and facilitators at the University of Surrey.
Connecting people to wildlife
I have lead ecotour holidays to many countries including France, Sardinia and Bulgaria. In 1986 Jonathan Cape published the first photographic guide to dragonflies under my authorship. I have subsequently contributed to other field guides on dragonflies and was president of the British Dragonfly Society for 8 years where I fundraised for their first full time officer and was made an honorary member for my contributions to the Society. I am one of the four founders of the Ancient Yew Group and have had national and regional photographic exhibitions on ancient yews.