tPCA Annual General Meeting 2026
The Person-Centred Association held its Annual General Meeting on Sunday 6 September 2026, bringing members together to reflect on the work of the Association, take part in its governance and connect as a person-centred community.
As part of this year’s AGM, we were delighted to welcome two keynote speakers, Maria Kontarini and Katie Clancy, who offered two very different explorations of what the Person-Centred Approach can mean when we take it beyond familiar territory.
We are pleased to be able to share recordings of both presentations.
Maria Kontarini
From Being to Doing: Person-Centred Leadership, Power and Organisational Life
The Person-Centred Approach has given us a profound understanding of what becomes possible when people meet one another with empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard. But within the person-centred community, these conditions have often been explored primarily through therapy, encounter groups and spaces devoted to being.
What happens when we bring them into the doing of organisational life?
Organisations must make decisions, establish structures, manage resources and respond to financial realities. They involve hierarchy, leadership and differing levels of responsibility and power. These can be uncomfortable subjects within a community that places such importance on equality and non-directivity.
Drawing on her experience in management, human resources and organisational development, Maria Kontarini explores leadership, autonomy, accountability and organisational life from a person-centred perspective.
Katie Clancy
Lessons from the ‘others’
Like all great discoveries, my own was completely unplanned. The thing I spent so long trying to hide, fix, and justify, became a portal through which life has expanded for me.
Living as a plural system of distinct selves is perhaps not common, yet it is not as rare as psychiatry would have us believe. At the heart of the person-centred approach is this challenge to psychiatry; that we are the expert on our experience, not those with expert status about what falls outside of the so-called ‘norm’. This idea has revolutionised the way I approach my experience of plurality, in coming to accept and embrace a way of being that is widely deemed to be mad. In doing so, I have been humbled in learning from the ‘others’ I share embodiment with.
As it turns out, the ‘others’ have a lot to say, about us, the world, and counselling. In honouring the person-centred approach and listening to the wisdom within ourselves, we seek to share some of our lived experience and the lessons we have learned so far.
Thank you
Thank you to Maria and Katie for sharing their experiences, thinking and perspectives with our community, and to everyone who joined us for the 2026 AGM.
Our AGM is an important part of the life of tPCA. It gives members an opportunity not only to participate in the governance and future of the Association, but to come together, exchange ideas and continue exploring what it means to live and work within the Person-Centred Approach.