SCTRI Board of Directors: Report to Members
May 2026
Dear SCTRI Members:
The Board of Directors met on Zoom for 4 days, May 7-10. We alternate between digital and in-person meetings to reduce the travel impact for those members who have a distance to come to Philadelphia, and the impact on the climate.
Excitingly we welcomed Bernd Postma as a new member to the Board and sadly said “goodbye for now” to Ros Wood. Ros is leaving to allow for more resources for other life demands and hopes to return when she is free to do so.
The structure of our meeting allocates the first two days for training, working together to reduce the restraining forces within and among us to fully taking up our Board roles.
Summary of Process Work
As we all know, we humans have all sorts of reactions to differences, reactions that can easily trigger old survival roles and interfere with our ability to take up functional roles in the present. As an SCT-informed Board we make it our work to recognize those triggers and reduce the reactive restraining forces as best we can. In short, we work together to undo both our survival roles and our role locks. In this session we developed our capacity to give one another feedback about our role outputs and their effects on our working system, and to receive and process that feedback productively. As a result, we felt able to speak more freely. We also sharpened our awareness of work related to taking up the responsibilities of our Board roles, both at the member and the group-as-a-whole levels.
Board Policy and Staffing Work
In the second half of the Board meeting, we turned our attention to our task work – setting policies and supporting the health of the organization. First, thank you to the action groups that gave the semi-annual updates on your work. These updates keep the Board in touch with the energy, creativity and barriers experienced in the work of the organization. The dedication everyone brings to this work is what drives this organization forward, and the time and talent you give to it matters enormously.
Annual Conference 2027: Online!
SCT Conference 2027 will be held online June 5-11. Many of you have let the Conference system know that you would prefer that, at least at intervals. Online training opens the potential for many people to join who cannot afford the time, money or other resources needed to travel.
We did explore 2 other choices: Swarthmore and Toronto. Toronto has several driving forces: an active group therapy training association (Toronto Institute of Group Studies) that has hosted Susan Gantt numerous times; a vital city with several universities; a different nationality, outside the US. However, it turned out there were several hurdles to negotiate and not enough lead time for 2027. We are hopeful that it might be a viable choice for the 2028 Annual Conference.
Vision Work
At the last Board meeting we embraced the need to adapt our structure to better function in the current reality. Our membership is changing, more widely distributed, and the world is changing. One specific reality is that the cost, both personal and environmental, of travel is rising. And having digital programs and communications is likely vital to survival.
The 3 vision groups are:
- Partnering with Practitioners – looks at how SCTRI might support practitioners with energy to build training programs, by providing support for marketing, registration and the administrative side of running workshops. As a next step, this group will take its ideas to the Licensed Practitioners and advanced members for further exploration.
- Modernizing SCTRI – looks at how we might spread the word about SCT via marketing and social media, as well as a host of other ways we might want to change how we function.
- Expanding Access – is exploring restraining forces people may experience to participating in SCT trainings, and what we can do as an organization to reduce them.
A fourth working group, Member Engagement, has proposed plans for bringing members into the conversation about the future of the SCT Community, via a series of visioning focus groups to be held over Zoom in the fall. Stay tuned for more information about how you can participate.
We recognized that these potentially transformative plans will need expanded resources for the Director as well as the support of an operations role. We began exploring what this next phase of the Director role may look like. This is particularly timely as Mike Maher will be stepping down in October 2027 after 10 years as Director.
Process Directly in Support of Task
There were two important themes of process work that we did during the policy work. One was to clarify and re-commit to our definition of consensus decision-making: using functional subgrouping to explore elements of an issue until a clear pathway begins to emerge. At this point some individual members may still be holding the differences they have voiced. The work then becomes exploring whether there is more to be unpacked for the system in the subgroup holding the difference, or whether individual members can agree to whole-heartedly support the emerging pathway, despite personal preferences.
The second was around giving a clear remit and fully supporting the authority of subsystems formed to take up a task. We encountered our resistance to giving clear authority to working subsystems, e.g., a small group that will work to define the function and the resources needed for the Director role in this transition. We worked these restraining forces through subgrouping, with the result that the ad hoc systems were more clearly authorized and free to work, including when and how they will report their outcomes to the Board. This is a leading edge of our organization’s development. It is important to track the outcome of this attempt to clarify authority and accountability.
Board of Directors
Claudia Byram, Fran Carter, Rowena Davis, Susan Gantt, Dorothy Gibbons, Doug Johnson, Nina Klebanoff, Jennifer Langdon, Annie MacIver, Mike Maher, Jon McCormick, Jim Peightel, Bernd Postma, Norma Safransky, Beulah Trey, Heather Twomey, Ros Wood, Alida Zweidler-McKay