Co-Counselling International (UK)

Building and Strengthening a Co-counselling Community

JanPieter Hoogma (Scotland)

1. good, clear leaflet
2. good clear poster
3. places for distribution poster, leaflets:
   1. health food shops
   2. central libraries distribute them for you(?)
   3. film houses (alternative)
   4. health centres
   5. libraries of hospitals
4. ask co-counsellors around you:
   1. where they find info about things like coco
   2. where they can leave posters and/or leaflets
   3. where the read about things like coco
5. ask any prospect where they found out about you so that you can discover eventually which places for publicity work and which don't.
6. get your name on list of:
   1. alternative health magazines
   2. mental health directories
   3. self help group directories
   4. local info search system (in libraries etc.)
7. get the coco manual in the libraries with your name and address in it.
8. But the best publicity is the good quality of your fundamentals AND the after sales (forgive my marketing terms) so that people stay on with Co-Counselling. A good experience during the fundamentals is not good enough. People need to be empowered and supported to go on with coco and eventually they become your best ambassadors and support you in finding new prospects...

To Strengthen Community

1. An ample supply of workshops and other opportunities where new co-counsellors can find Co-Counselling partners and can get used to co-counselling culture including its socialisation.
2. Providing Further Skills workshops in which new co-counsellors develop confidence in clienting, counselling, socialising and facilitating. Topics might be: managing conflicts, sexuality and attraction, how to work on topics that seem too big to work on, let alone by Co-Counselling; learning to convene and facilitate peer groups on shared themes (shyness, aging, depression and panic attacks); applied Co-Counselling workshops on important aspects of life such as parenting, grieving, designing your future, you name it.
3. A pro-active reaching out to new co-counsellors in all co-counselling workshops, as 'established' co-counsellors generally speaking tend to be more oriented to the ones they know and love, than to the ones they don't know and don't feel love for (yet). Too many new co-counsellors are disappearing after fundamentals without the established co-counsellors even noticing them.
4. Have a long term co-operation agreement between co-counsellors who want to focus less on their own 'community belonging' or 'eternally reinventing creatively the wheels' needs, and who are more prepared to 'sweat' or work with tenacity and creative exploration on providing other and new co-counsellors with opportunities for networking and settling into Co-Counselling. By the way this gives as a nice side effect a realistic sense of community without chasing the 'community sensation' which I am starting to consider more and more as addictive and counter productive to supporting people settling in Co-Counselling.