20 May 2024
This year, during the week of 20-26 May, we celebrate 'National Volunteer Week.' This is an opportunity to publicly acknowledge the incredible contributions made to our professions by the passion-driven individuals who freely give their time in pursuit of a vision and cause that they believe in.
Foundations of PACFA
Hugh Crago, lecturer in counselling at the University of New England in Armidale and co-author of the popular counselling textbook A Safe Place for Change along with his colleague, called on their network of peers at similar institutes to meet together, in-person to discuss the future of the profession.
They were concerned that their better-organised colleagues from the psychological sciences were dominating the political landscape and popular narrative regarding the use of the so-called 'psychotherapies.' They were concerned that psychologists saw no place for non-psychologists in the treatment of mental health conditions and the promulgation of psychological well-being and were taking steps to render counsellors and psychotherapists redundant and irrelevant.
Every PACFA member resonates with the feelings of injustice and anguish at the incredible loss to society and the human condition should such a fate come to pass.
At these meetings, it was agreed that counsellors and psychotherapists needed to be defined by nationally consistent competencies and standards; that a minimum tertiary qualification in counselling or psychotherapy needed to be established; and that a national body was required to maintain both the standard and a register of individuals who had been independently assessed as having attained that standard.
And so, in 1999, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia was born.
There was no funding, no members, and a huge amount of work to be done. The people who cared, the people who could see that something needed to be done, stepped up. They stepped up and did what needed to be done to protect a set of practices that they appreciated, even if others didn't.
Recognising our PACFA volunteers
Today this proud tradition continues; a great deal of the work being done by PACFA is being done by volunteers. Members of our state Branch Leadership Groups provide a local presence that listens to and shines a light upon local and state specific issues affecting the profession. They facilitate networking for members who are very often isolated in the roles they play in their working lives, and they produce professional development opportunities relevant to both their branch members and the broader membership.
Interest Groups for Older People; Children and Young People; and Diversity in Gender, Body, Kinship, and Sexuality provide focal points for advocacy, information, and professional development relevant to their specified populations.
Leadership Groups for our Colleges of Counselling, Psychotherapy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Practitioners, Supervision, Relationship Counselling, and Creative and Experiential Therapies provide leadership, advocacy, community, professional development, and advanced accreditation pathways for their areas of specialisation.
Board reporting Committees include the Professional Standards Committee, Ethics Committee (including trained Ethics Panel Members), Research Committee and Governance Committee.
The valuable work done by each of these committees is done by PACFA Members who volunteer their time to ensure that the work gets done.
At times, we will put together working parties to do additional tasks that often requires additional expertise. At present, we have an active Accreditation Standards Working Party, made up of esteemed counselling educators who are giving their time to develop a new set of user-friendly, industry standards for training program accreditation, as well as a Constitution Review Committee tasked with re-writing the PACFA Constitution to support our good governance into the future.
Each of these groups of hard-working volunteers are accountable to the vision and values established by the PACFA Board, itself made up of a hard-working group of individuals who volunteer their time to stand up for what they believe in.
I would like you to join me in extending our heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to each and every one of these individuals who selflessly gets on with the job of doing what needs to be done to secure the future of our professions.
-- Nigel Polak, PACFA President