Planned Environment Therapy Trust

An integrated oral history, archive, internet-based, and person-to-person approach to gathering, preserving and sharing a neglected aspect of the nation's industrial, cultural and social heritage, 'Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children' has been a major archive and oral history project. 

With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, between January 2010 and October 2011 the Planned Environment Therapeutic Trust (PETT) worked with volunteers from five children's communities to record personal histories, preserve the archives of individuals and communities, and help people to share and learn about their own, and other people's heritage.

Although the funding has come to an end, the work goes on!

More information and project community spaces can be found on the project website www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk, where the Project Director's final report and a copy of the Project Booklet can also be downloaded.  To request a hardcopy of the publication, please contact us directly.

The Joint Newsletter of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities, and the Planned Environment Therapy Trust (and the Community of Communities when it first came along) was an ambitious joint venture of the three main British charities devoted to therapeutic communities and environments. It published from 2002 to 2004, and the twelve issues are still available online here, on the PETT website.

The Archive housed the editorial offices, and performed the main tasks of Executive Editing, desk top publishing, liaising with the printer, and posting. The Joint Newsletter - a provisional title which stuck - brought together News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Archives and History, the Arts, Cartoons and Humour, and Correspondence, in an accessible way which involved the full spectrum of the therapeutic community world: therapists, residents, administrators, researchers, ex-staff, former residents, children of current adults, family-members, friends, writers, publishers...psychiatric, prison, addictions, children and young people... 

Writing in issue Number 7, American subscriber and Clinical Psychologist J. Tyler Carpenter captured the essence of the Joint Newsletter project:

"...I found that reading the entirety of The Joint Newsletter No.6 was akin to me actively listening to a long and complex musical composition comprised of tone poems, chord changes, different movements, and intermittent solo and choral activity. By turns I was engaged, lulled, soothed, and surprised. At the end of the experience, when I had metabolized the individual contributions and a sense of the whole emerged in my mind, I realized with some subtle shock, that the effect of the Newsletter was to expand my sense of the multifarious milieu into cyberspace, and in doing so extend the shared sense of community."