ABSTRACT

Retrospective introduction I wrote this paper when I was working as a counsellor and researcher for a voluntary sector organisation, the Upstairs Project (Hammersmith Crisis Centre Ltd.). The Project was a small street agency in west London, which was aimed at and attracted young people (which the Project defined as aged between 18 and 25, although we did work with some clients either side of this age range). We had opened in 1981, committed to providing a youth counselling service and to evaluating the service. However, first we had to deal with the fall-out from a research design, a randomised controlled trial, by which it was planned that we would randomly accept or turn away young people from the Project. Another aspect of the proposed design was that we would then follow up the young people who we had turned away in order to compare their subsequent lives with those that we had seen for counselling! A local psychiatrist (who, we subsequently discovered, had control over the Project’s finances) attempted to impose this research protocol on us; we refused, and, as a result, were promptly sacked. We picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down, raised money, and, within a few months, had reopened the centre with an independent management committee, with both staff and management still committed to practice-based research.