Abstract:
What the Planned Environment Therapy Trust achieved in establishing the Archive and Study Centre was impossible. There is no way in the world it ought to have been able to create and then sustain for 30 years, through immense periods of difficulty, an internationally recognised, award-winning national treasure of an Archive and Study Centre - starting with one collection, housed in one bedroom (which was being lived in), in which the collection was sorted, catalogued, boxed, stored, and consulted; with no budget, and no precedent; and concluding with purpose built facilities and accommodation, hundreds of collections, thousands of publications, researchers from around the world, members of communities who considered it a second home, and programmes of engagement which were an inspiration and model for others. The whole thing was impossible until it was done.
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At the end of November 2018, we held a one-day event at what is currently the MB3 site in Toddington, Gloucestershire, to mark the end of the PETT era. We called it "Celebrating Us: Our Communities, Friends, and PETT". PETT as an active charity was being wound down, and the Archive was being prepared for hand-over to the Mulberry Bush Organisation. Caryn Onions from the Mulberry Bush and for a time John Turberville, members of communities, users of the archive, family members and friends were there. Freezing in an underheated marquee, but socially warm.
David Kennard, an old friend of the Archive and an active supporter, read out part of an editorial I'd written in 2004 for the last edition of the Joint Newsletter (the full version is here):
"Really impossible things are not made possible through belief; but disbelief (often through lack of experience and training), or the active and positive belief that something is not possible (often through contrary training or personal experience, or sometimes through personal or organisational need), can scupper even the best project or programme, much less squeeze the small light of possibility out of a difficult or pioneering enterprise - ensuring its failure, and then using that failure as proof of its impossibility. In the bottomless present there is no answer. The answer, insofar as there is an answer, lies in people who know from their own experience what is or may be possible, or who recognise the limits of their own training and experience and are therefore (critically and reflectively!) open to the experience and knowledge of others. It lies in communication and shared experience."
Which contains my answer to the question "Is a sustainable centre for the history and heritage of therapeutic communty-style practices possible?" Yes. Or it can be.
We showed it was possible by doing it. It was not straightforward, nor simple; nor is it something that could always be done by anyone. But the Planned Environment Therapy Trust managed to conjure an award-winning Archive and Study Centre out of nothing and sustain it for the better part of 30 years.
"But then it folded".
No, neither the Planned Environment Therapy Trust nor the Archive and Study Centre "folded". There was no collapse. There was no failure.
When PETT handed over the torch to the Mulberry Bush Organisation at the end of 2018, it was as a going if financially straitened concern, and not because the Trust was failing or because PETT Trustees were compelled by imminent collapse. To the contrary, led by Director Richard Rollinson and Transition Project Manager Fiona Talwar-Lomberg, funded since 2016 through a £72,300 Transition Grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Trustees had been actively and carefully "searching for a new way forward to protect the legacy of the Archive which has been created over the course of 30 years" ("Trustee Communication about PETT and the Future", July 25, 2018).
The Trustees were experienced people who were imagining what would happen if the ratio of outgoings to incomings did not change significantly enough, quickly enough, to prevent the steady drip-drip-drip of the annual deficit from eroding the Trust's reserves entirely, to the point where there was nothing left with which to make an orderly transition. They did not want themselves, or more likely their successors, to arrive ten or fifteen years into the future with no option but to preside over an emergency winding up and disposal of the archive and heritage collections; unable, without the kinds of funds available in 2018, to make sure the collections went safely and with forethought and consideration, to new homes.
The decision at PETT to transfer its assets to the Mulberry Bush, with the Mulberry Bush taking on the task of stewardship and management, was taken on July 8, 2018. At that point there were at least two active alternative streams of future development in motion.
One was driven to a great extent by users and community members of the Archive. By "community members", I mean people who themselves and their communities were represented in the collections. Wenningtonian Sam Doncaster enlisted the support of Doug King, an internationally experienced project manager, who visited with Trustees and a support group at the beginning of June 2018, and both laid out a way forward and offered his support to get there. At the end of the month, on June 29, 2018, Rich and Fiona called together an enthusiastic "What do we do now?" meeting at the Archive, again heavily supported by community members. In her summarising for readers of the PETT's eNewletter for July 2018 (Number 35), Fiona wrote:
One of the most memorable moments for me was listening to Gill Cook of the Caldecott Association speak of the importance of the PETT Archive “to the children from homes and backgrounds where they had no support or any family at all [who] need to find out more about where they grew up, meet the people they lived with and much more.” I am sure we are all holding this in mind as we work together to further explore all of the emerging ideas in support of ensuring a stronger future for the work of the Trust [my emphasis. This is what the coming agreement with the Mulberry Bush would mean, from the PETT point of view: a stronger future].
Community members went away from the event fired up both with the sense of urgency and of purpose, and began generating leads and activity.
There was support coming in from the other side, so to speak, as well, from community members who had died: A bequest of £50,000 from the late Ralph Gee was on its way. He was an old Red Hill School boy who became very actively involved in the "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children" project. Another £20,000 was coming from the estate of the late Bill Garner, a teacher-by-choice of the C-stream in a state school in Peckham who'd been influenced by David Wills, and with whom I recorded an extended series of regular interviews over the phone, but never met in person.
This investment by the Archive over many years in the lives of community members, and their investment In the Archive and its future in return - the power and influence of Continuity of Concern, to use the late Josephine Lomax-Simpson's term (who had herself given a substantial donation while alive), was one of the assets which the Trust carried; and we were increasingly seeing how PETT's investment in the diversity and nature of relationships built up over 30 years in a culture of support and service was manifesting in a financial return.
The second stream was a costed, negotiated, and ready-to-be implemented plan to move the collections as a whole to the Re:store archival storage facility at Upper Heyford, where they could continue to be worked on and consulted, and from which, with agreement with the Mulberry Bush, tranches could even be taken to Standlake to be consulted by researchers and community-members there. The existing resources of the Trust would have been augmented by the sale of the Toddington site, while grant and fundraising activity would have continued by Trustees, and alongside their other work, by an ongoing team.
The decision on July 8, 2018 to transfer PETT's assets to the Mulberry Bush Organisation, less than two weeks after the "What do we do now?" meeting, took supporters and the onsite team by surprise, and there was a wave of shock whose background radiation can still, from time to time, be felt. It would have been better to find a way to keep everyone more closely informed that it was such a live possibility, given the long period since 2017 of now a Yes, and now a No, in what must have been, very obviously, a complex and sensitive set of discussions, and a massive undertaking for the Mulberry Bush Organisation particularly. In terms of belief and possibility, communication is essential, if sometimes difficult.
In their official announcement circulated on July 25, "Trustee Communication about PETT and the Future", the PETT Trustees said:
We hope that you will welcome the positive news, as PETT Trustees did, that the Mulberry Bush Organisation (MBO) have made a commitment to take responsibility for the Planned Environment Therapy Archive [note already the use of the new name], for the National Child Care Library and for the Toddington site. Their determination is to secure a viable long term on site presence.
This really was quite remarkable, and a strong outcome for continuity. Without sharing the details, and while simultaneously emphasising the security while inserting implied caveats, which many among the community members picked up, they explained:
The Mulberry Bush Organisation’s commitment is based on a robust 3 year Business Plan they have produced. This has identified and secured necessary investment and resources that will seek to establish sustainable futures for the Archive and National Child Care Library whilst it remains on site in Toddington, with a commitment to ensure generous access to the collections.
They also explained:
In order to enact this transfer to the MBO it is necessary that PETT will be wound up as a Charity...From now, therefore, and through the autumn months PETT will work to prepare a safe and secure handover, aiming for our formal closure at the end of December 2018...We do hope that you will work and travel alongside us to ensure ongoing support to secure a future that preserves the Archive and site for many more years to come.
The phrasing "our formal closure at the end of December 2018" can leave room for ambiguity if you are not familiar with the history and the nature of the transfer process. As a member of staff whose contract ran to December 31st, it meant that PETT's oversight and operations would be closed down, and taken over by the Mulberry Bush at that point (although it actually happened a little under two weeks earlier). As a matter of legal necessity, as part of the transfer of institutional assets and obligations, the Planned Environment Therapy Trust would have to be wound up. There is no scope here for "folding".
The process of winding up itself took almost two more years. The Trust ceased to operate and was removed from the Charities Register on September 17, 2020.
"But is a sustainable centre possible now?"
As a practical matter, once the existing collections are broken up and dispersed, and perhaps weeded further in their new settings, the answer is No. Reconstituting an unbruised and undamaged Collection ceases to be possible. Although given my paragraph from the 2004 editorial, I need to take at least one step back: The complexity and cost of reuniting the collections intact and not broken would be beyond my imagination. But even Einstein didn't believe in the possibility of Black Holes, and look where we are now. Let's not confine the future entirely by what we know to be true today.
The ecosystem, on the other hand, will be destroyed utterly and irrevocably.
Again, with optimism: It might be possible to maintain some coherence and integrity through virtual means, if the resources were there and there were people employed to develop the possibilities of a virtual ecosystem, tied to the dispersed and distributed diaspora of the collections. That would be to create an all-new ecosystem, which would be fascinating and pioneering, if done well and with vision, and could be immensely impactful, if done well and with vision and was sustainable. But the richness and diversity of the living ecosystem which exists today, will have been clear-cut and burned off.
But once the collections are disposed of, the biggest concern is the fact that "the active and positive belief that something is not possible (often through contrary training or personal experience, or sometimes through personal or organisational need), can scupper even the best project or programme, much less squeeze the small light of possibility out of a difficult or pioneering enterprise - ensuring its failure, and then using that failure as proof of its impossibility."
If we bequeath that to our successors in ahistorical narratives of failures unsupported by the richness of documentation, recorded experience, analysis and established facts, self-reflection and self-criticism, then we become complicit in destroying the future's access to the agency of possibility which they are gifted from the past. We burden them with a presumption of impossibility, which will cripple, and not free, their (our) potential. That is not what therapeutic communities are about.
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