This year has been a busy time of consolidating the work of former Committees and a major focus has been streamlining our internal processes. Our membership has steadily grown and we are on a stable financial footing. Georg will expand on this in the Treasurer's report. My thanks go to Georg as he steps down from his role as Treasurer. Its a difficult job that few people want to take on and Georg has been very generous with his time and very committed to the work of CAPACAR.
One major task that is close to completion has been an audit of all our CAPACAR members on the PACFA Register. This has been a very challenging task and our Membership Sec Jennifer Hume has taken the lion's share of the work relating to this, with the able assistance of Ruth Duffy. I would like to thank them both for their very hard work and patience as they tackled this task.
Work has also begun on the membership Directory and an audit of our Clinical members will also be underway soon.
We offered two professional development events to members last year, a 'Mental Health First Aid Course', facilitated by Andrew MacFarlane and a workshop by Annette Fisher on 'Developing our Professional Identities as Counsellors and Psychotherapists'. Both events were very high quality and provided excellent opportunities for training, reflection on our professional practices and networking. Thank you to Andrew and Annette for sharing your expertise with us.
Our two regular groups 'Open Space' and the 'Reading Group' have a steady core of enthusiastic attendees and both will continue throughout this year. Thank you to Kate Flaherty and Willi Boettcher and more recently Elizabeth Done for your work with Open Space, and to Jennifer and Ruth for their leadership of the Reading Group. These groups form the core of our PD and are highly valued.
We have continued to forge strong links with PACFA, most recently, Ruth Duffy and I went to PACFA Council in March where we received an update on important developments in the field. Ione will expand on these shortly. Ione also joined me in a meeting with our Federal member, Gai Brodtmann to promote the important role of counsellors and psychotherapists in the ACT and assisted us in making successful representations to one of our ACT government departments, to continue to include counsellors and psychotherapists in the delivery of their therapeutic services. In addition, Ruth Duffy and I were part of a PACFA accreditation panel for the Metavision Training Institute, last month.
The work of CAPACAR relies heavily on the efforts of our Committee members and volunteers. I would like to thank all our outgoing Committee. In particular Jennifer Hume for her dedication and perseverance in the very demanding role of membership secretary, Georg in his time consuming role as Treasurer; to Kate for her leadership as former President; Helen Geltch who has been an incomparable Minute Secretary; Andrew MacFarlane for his wise counsel; Ruth Duffy who will be assuming the role of Membership Secretary and who has already given very generously of her time and skills, Nasrin Lucas and Gale Funston, and John Franklin our Public Officer. I also wish to acknowledge the very important work of Brenda Franklin, our website manager, who very generously donates all her time.
Finally, thank you to our members who have supported CAPACAR activities, we look forward to more exciting things ahead.
Thank you, Elizabeth Yuile