The Trustee Group
The Trustee Group (TG) are made up of the Person Centred Association members who volunteer to help in the development of the Association. There is a maximum of nine Trustees plus 3 co-opted members.
Trustees are elected for a two-year team and can be re-elected twice, so there is a maximum term of six consecutive years.
The TG meet monthly, online, and minutes are viewable to members here.
Who are tTPCA’s trustees?
You can read more about each of us, and why we choose to volunteer as a trustee, using the links below.
We also want to share a brief overview of who we are as a group. There is often a complaint against boards that they are white, middle-class, cisgender and heterosexual and so we are sharing something of our collective experience in the world.
As a group of trustees, we recognise that we could always be more diverse and we welcome enquiries from people interested in the person-centred approach, who would like to join us. At the moment, we have members of different genders (and none), different sexualities, different races and ethnicities. Several of us have disabilities of one kind or another, including neurodivergences. It can often be the case that one person is ‘the diversity’ in the group and we’re pleased to say that this is not the case in this trustee group!
If you are interested in becoming a trustee please email us at
For those of you who are practitioners with a formal requirment for CPD and you are considering helping out by becoming a trustee, you may be pleased to know that acting as a trustee for the PCA yields 40 hours of CPD per year. The list of activities credited by BACP is here, and for UKCP sample guidance is here, and for National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society unfortunately it is behind their login page here.
I have been in love with the person-centred approach since stumbling across Carl Rogers at the beginning
of my undergraduate degree in 2007. I read ‘The Carl Rogers Reader’ and it felt like someone had put into
words something that I had always felt intuitively – a lovely experience!
My degree was a preparation for going into teaching, but it wasn’t long after qualifying as a teacher that I
turned towards training to be a therapist, having had my career in mainstream teaching ruined by reading
too many progressive education books. I’ve been happily qualified as a therapist since 2017.
I had another moment like the one I described when reading Rogers in around 2021 when I read the
Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). While not explicitly tied in with the PCA, I find the
principles of the PTMF to be complimentary to the approach and it also makes the radical/political
elements of it more explicit. Alongside the person-centred approach itself, I am very interested in the
broader politics of mental health and the implications of the approach in a wider context.
I should probably address that I am also qualified as an EMDR therapist, which some may find
controversial! At heart though, I see it as a slightly more structured and focused way of allowing the
actualising tendency to do its thing – a little bit like Focusing, in that way. Unfortunately it is often
dressed up in quite medicalised language which I personally stay away from.
As well as a therapist in private practice, I work for at a residential mental health crisis house. It is run by
a survivor-led charity and offers person-centred support to people who would otherwise need a hospital,
but it is decided would benefit from a less medicalised and more ‘homely’ environment. I’ve also worked
as a tutor and a counselling service manager.
In my spare time I like to read, write, play and watch football, and I am also a keen (if not proficient) DIY
enthusiast.
I am a person centred counsellor working in an Oxford rape crisis charity to support survivors of sexual and domestic abuse. I am also a qualified clinical supervisor offering one to one and group supervision. I enjoy working with counsellors to help them develop their practice, their understanding of themselves and to ensure safe ethical practice for their clients.
My commitment to the person centre approach and my respect for its philosophy is ever growing. It has had a profound effect on the way I live my life – or try to – as well as proving itself time and again to be transformative for people much more accustomed to fearing stigma, prejudice, rejection and pathologising responses. I look forward to being a trustee of tPCA to add another dimension to my involved with the approach. Outside of my counselling work I work as qualitative social researcher primarily supporting charities and other non-profits. I also enjoy connecting with friends and family, theatre and the arts, singing and walking.
I am pleased to be a trustee for the PCA given my passion for the person-centred approach and its values. I currently lead a postgrad Person-Centred and Experiential training program as well as working in private practice with adults, couples, young people and supervisees.
The foundational attitudes of the person-centred approach feel very core to my being, and integral to my everyday life and how I experience the world. I am passionate about personal power, respecting autonomy and trusting in experience.
Outside of the counselling room, I enjoy organising community events, playing games, movement and exercise, meditation and reading.
Graduated from Aberdeen University with a PGDip Person-Centered Counselling in 2023, Set up in private practice offering adult online and face to face counselling sessions based up in Aberdeenshire - https://www.jessicagrasham-counselling.com
Before this my background was in the media, child development and cultivating deep affinities for creativity, communication, arts, nature and animals.
I believe each person is unique and enjoy providing a unique safe healing space for clients to be their own self and explore connections, feelings and situations they are finding difficult, confusing or are just stuck in.
The person-centred approach is all that. Doing Counselling Skills for CPD during 2020 Lockdown was when I first discovered Carl Rogers book 'Becoming a Person'. It felt like home. I found instances, descriptions and theories that fitted and made life-sense to me. The core qualities of acceptance, empathy and unconditional positive regard are universal and timeless. Person-centredness embraces 'persons' with no judgement.
As diverse, different, unique, individual humans, we are linked by the simple beautiful intuitive need and right to be loved and accepted. For us to thrive and live our best lives this is necessary, it starts with the self, extends to others and then across society.
Hi! I'm LJ, and my pronouns are my name (rather than he/she/they/etc).
I'm a white, disabled, queer, trans person-centred counsellor and trainer, working as a counselling lecturer a university and as a therapist and supervisor in private practice.
I was drawn to the person-centred approach as a trainee, as I didn't want anything that I could hide behind when in the room with a client. The approach feels radical to me in its requirement to be fully present with the client, whilst paying full attention to the world in which we're all inhabiting.
As a trustee, I believe in getting involved and like to be an active member, and be part of the initiatives that come up within the PCA worlds that I inhabit.
Outside of being a trustee I like to read (pretty much everything!), and I'm a big fan of bake-off, which is almost the only 'TV' that I watch.
I am thrilled to have joined tPCA’s board of trustees this year. As a recently qualified person centred therapist who has over 25 years of working in the field of inclusive education in HE, finding a place to work alongside others who are also passionate about the person centred approach is a real encouragement and delight. Much of my work around issues to do with inclusion, diversity and developing inclusive practice has focused on the importance of process and around finding ways for more relational ways of working that challenge assumptions around individual need and what counts as success. Roger’s Person-centred theory has much in common here; not least the idea of transformational healing as being a process and a journey, one that is unique to each client and in the hands of the client. I think it was this idea that counsellor and client are both on a level playing field as it were that attracted me to the theory more than 7 years ago and to this day, I think it is radical in its assertion. Indeed, this position of the counsellor as ‘non-expert’ and the emphasis on empowering the client remains a challenge to those medicalised approaches that seek to pathologise
behaviour and provide neatly packaged solutions for what is seen as wrong with the client. As a theory, the PC approach is not easily packaged which is something that sits well with me; there is plenty of scope for exploration and development and more recent developments around relational depth from Mearns and Cooper (2017) have only
served to emphasise the theory’s depth and mystery. I look forward to working alongside supportive colleagues in the PCA in furthering understanding of the person centred approach and its application in practice.
As well as reading and writing (and talking about reading and writing!) I love to walk our German Shepherd around the reservoirs up here in Bolton. I love to sing and being involved in choirs. I also love sitting in cafes drinking coffee.
I am a person-centred therapist working with children and young people predominantly. I also work with Asian people from the Indian subcontinent, mainly with adults who have language challenges.
My passion for the person-centred approach began at the trainee practitioner stage when I started my own therapy with a deeply person-centred therapist and being. The experience of change and transformation in the right environment, cemented my belief in the approach. Since then I have experienced numerous encounter groups, which are rooted in the person-centred approach. These are an experience in ongoing growth and development. The desire to support the person-centred approach has grown, hence. I am passionate about autonomy, personal power and acceptance. I strongly believe in trusting the process, which has brought me where I want to be in my private world. I am passionate about the person-centred approach which provides space to hold and contain varying views and co-exist. I want to be a part of tPCA so that I can contribute towards promoting this approach and spreading the love of it.
In my free time, I read, play with paints and pens, and write poems. I have been fortunate to be selected for many of my haiku and other forms of poems to be published in various anthologies, in print and online.