Craig Fees completed his masters degree in theater history from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1981. It took five glorious years filled with doing productions in and outside the College, and visiting virtually every major library in the Los Angeles basin, often at lunchtime in my work van. I was a pick-up and delivery driver for the young Los Angeles Cash Register Company. The title of the thesis was "Medieval Theater in Indo-European Context."
Which led to
A Rotary Foundation Fellowship, sponsored by Rossmoor Rotary Club in Walnut Creek, California, to begin work in the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies at the University of Leeds, in England, initially as an MPhil, and then as a PhD. pursuing themes which had emerged from the M.A through archives, oral history, and libraries throughout England and Scotland, and back in the United States, . The dissertation title was "Christmas Mumming in a North Cotswold Town: With Special Reference to Tourism, Urbanisation and Immigration-Related Social Change". The work took seven years from start to finish, 1981-1988. There were distractions.
For example
Early in the fieldwork I fell into a residential therapeutic community for children, as a place to trade my labour for a room and a volunteer's stipend of £5 per week, and £5 per week at the end of the month. It went up to £6 each way at some point. I began in 1982 and was deeply drawn in into lives and possibilities I could never have imagined, and it was from here that I was invited in late 1988, footloose from having finished the PhD, to explore the implications of different models of gathering and looking after the history, documents and memory of planned environment therapy/therapeutic community interpreted broadly (which is an essential, given the nature of what I call 'the field', and the inability of language to account for the unifying reality underpinning "therapeutic community").
In 1989 the Trustees of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust asked me to begin work on establishing the most comprehensive of the options they'd handed me to explore, which was a full-blown activist Archive and Study Centre devoted to "the field". Continued until redundancy/retirement at the end of December 2018.
Distinctions:
RMSA/RMARA: Registered Member of the Society of Archivists, now the Archives and Records Association, 2003 to post retirement.
2012: Charity Archives and Heritage Group's "Most Impactful Archive" Award. A shared distinction with other project team members, including students from Trinity Catholic School in Leamington Spa and their teacher Stephen Steinhaus, for the Heritage Lottery Funded "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930-c.1980", which I designed and directed.
2013: The "Archive of the Year Award" from Your Family History Magazine. A shared distinction, with fellow team members of the "Therapeutic Living" project, and by extension the participants in the "Therapeutic Living" project who nominated the Archive.
Appearing in a powerpoint presentation by Gary Winship, Professor at the School of Education at the University of Nottingham where he is course leader of the MA in Trauma Informed Practice, among "pioneers of therapeutic community", in a presentation to the Association of Therapeutic Communities' annual Windsor Conference (Winship, G (2015) Therapeutic Communities and Anarchy. Windsor Conference. The UK Consortium of Therapeutic Communities Annual Conference. Windsor, UK. October 19-21)
Referred to by Jan Lees, co-author with David Kennard of the Kennard-Lees Audit Checklist, as "Mr. Therapeutic Community".
