As I’m settling into my second year at BAAT I’ve been reflecting on the past 12 months and the journey the organisation is on. BAAT has grown and developed for years with many successes along the way. It enjoys a good reputation as an informed and authoritative voice for art therapy and provides a wide range of member services.

I’ve been particularly impressed with the range and number of short courses and CPD opportunities on offer to members, and impressed with our Journal which continues to grow in standing. The commitment and professionalism of the staff team, Council members, the editorial team of the Journal and the co-ordinators of our Regional and Special Interest Groups is quite something. There is a clear sense of an art therapy community working to support colleagues and promote the benefits of the clinical work.

However, this hard work and dedication hasn’t been helped by an increasingly creaking infrastructure. As a small organisation, finances are tight but thankfully last year we felt that we had resources to make a much-needed investment in technology that should improve the membership experience.

The most obvious manifestation of this investment will be our new website, which is now well underway and should be ready to ‘go live’ in the early autumn. Behind the website lies a complex set of processes that we have been working hard to improve and simplify. A completely new membership database, payment platforms and new online Member Forums are all being built to improve member experience of BAAT, with a single member login to access online services.

We have also been making changes to our internal processes and have reshaped the staff team to help improve our ability to deliver member services. This includes ensuring we respond more quickly to member queries – something the recent all-member survey indicated some members felt needed to be improved.

Alongside these operational developments, I’ve been been working with Council members and others to review and think about the longer-term activity and aims of the organisation. When BAAT was small, organic and entrepreneurial growth was often the way to move forward. Council no longer feels this is sustainable, and we need now to develop in a more planned and strategic manner, whilst crucially ensuring that members’ views inform the process.

We are working to develop a clearer sense of direction in a more structured and inclusive way, to help achieve the goals that are important to members. A key part of this will be our strategic plan – something BAAT has not had before. As I write, we are consulting on the draft plan, and I am looking forward to reviewing the feedback from members. The plan has five main, overarching strategic themes that describe what we feel we need to achieve:

• Develop BAAT as a strong authoritative voice, informed by our members, of the art therapy profession, and develop opportunity

• Ensure the efficacy of what we do is understood, and drive research and innovation, and their dissemination

• Better engage, understand, respond to and reflect the views of our membership

• Promote and champion equality, diversity and inclusion within the profession and within our professional networks

• Ensure the organisation and profession are well governed, inclusive and sustainable.

I’ve spent a considerable part of my career working in, or with, professional membership organisations, as a chief executive, senior manager, trustee and as a consultant. It’s always struck me that, whatever the organisation, there are issues that are common to all professional membership bodies.

It’s estimated that there are some 800 professional bodies in the UK, representing over 25 million practitioners across a range of professions. Whatever their size, they are all complicated organisations and BAAT is no different. At the heart of the complexity is how organisations effectively engage members in a way that ensures their views are heard and understood but, in doing so, don’t end up building a Byzantine structure of committees that consumes resources and renders decision making slow and impenetrable.

We have been thinking about how we can more effectively engage members. Hopefully members will have responded to several consultations in the past months, or perhaps attended one of the monthly Chair’s drop-in sessions. These are both mechanisms to enable us to better understand the concerns and aspirations of members.

Our Special Interest and Regional Groups are where members come together to support each other, develop thinking about good clinical practice and advise on the work of BAAT. In the coming months I hope to be able to start to review how they work and how we might better support the co-ordinators in their roles.

The pandemic has been an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone. Art therapists have had to develop working practices in amazingly creative ways to respond to the situation. BAAT moved to remote working for staff and our trainings and conferences went online. This opened our trainings up to a much wider range of members both in the UK and internationally and reached more people. But personal contact is something that remains important and part of what it is to be human. It is something we will need to review as we start to think about the future work programme for the organisation.

Externally, I’ve enjoyed meeting and building relationships with a wide range of stakeholders in the NHS, charity, education and wider mental health sectors. I’ve particularly enjoyed meeting students on the Master’s level art therapy courses and hearing about their aspirations for the future of their new profession.

Hopefully, with the pandemic now receding, those meetings will start to be in person and I’m greatly looking forward to ‘really meeting’ members around the UK.

Gary Fereday

Chief Executive