March 3, 2021
Dear ACBS,
Good morning from Boston. I’m writing from the wintry, soggy northeastern US, where we are on the cusp of Spring. We have had so many things going on in our community, and it’s time for another installment of the Sounding Board. Over the past few months, the ACBS Board has been up to many good things, and I’m happy to reconnect with you all again. We are going to need each other in this community as ACBS grows, and thrives, and diversifies around the world.
First, though, I just want to take a moment to talk about loss. We have lost so many that we have loved, who have inspired us – colleagues, friends, family. I am mindful that many of my friends have lost their parents, both in and outside of the community. I am so sorry for our collective losses. Our time here is so short, and this reminds me to use it well, and for the things that truly matter. To those of you who have lost those you love – my heart is with you, and you are never far from my thoughts.
In this season of loss, there is also beauty, and movement, and hope. When things feel dark, I turn to our ACBS community for inspiration. This month, I wanted to highlight two of our members who inspire me, and who I think will inspire you too! I interviewed both for the Sounding Board, and the theme of both of these interviews is the scale up of contextual behavioral science in two very different, but related domains.
On a cold morning in December, I Zoomed with Fredrik Livheim, who was at his home on a beautiful lake in Sweden, nestled in trees on the lakeshore, with big windows opening out to the blue and white of winter. Fredrik is a clinical psychologist who serves on the Management Team as the Lead Psychologist, where he is in charge of research and content strategy of a non-profit organization called 29K, which is named so because on average, we have 29,000 days to live on planet earth, and their purpose is to support as many people as possible to make their days count. He was excited, because that very day, Greta Thunberg had just been interviewed by the biggest newspaper in Sweden about the climate crisis. She took the media to task, noting that they have the power to say how pressing and how urgent this problem is – and that they are not doing their job. They made her the editor for a full day, and it just happened to be the day of our interview. You can read more about her issue here: https://www.dw.com/en/greta-thunberg-guest-stars-as-editor-of-swedish-newspaper/a-55837291.
29K poses a “metaproblem” that Fredrik and his team believes can be answered, in part, by contextual behavioral science: “If climate change, the mental health crisis, rising unequalites [sic] and our political crisis all are symptoms, the central cause is the meta-crisis of how we individually and collectively relate to ourselves, others and the world. For realistic, systemic and sustainable change this central cause has to change first.” Fredrik described 29K's goals as to provide a research platform to test cutting-edge materials to help scale up CBS and amplify its use to address global behavior. To learn more, here is a short video recording of Co-founder and CEO Erik Fernholm filmed at Brilliant Minds in Stockholm 2019., where he shared the stage that day with President Barack Obama, Forrest Whitaker, Naomi Campbell and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTSoLCHZ_M&feature=youtu.be. For more information, and a healthy dose of hope from the truly inspiring 29K, see here. To listen to our interview, and to hear about other amazingly talented ACBS members (who might or might not be Frank Bond and Jonathan Dowling) and who are also involved in 29K, listen here.
Just after visiting with Fredrik in Sweden, I Zoomed down to Bristol in the southwest of England to chat with Duncan Gillard, who visited me from his home, with his children running around in the background. Duncan works as a Senior Educational Psychologist who manages a team for 4 days a week, and on the 5th day, he works on CONNECT, which is, to his knowledge, the largest psychological flexibility-informed well-being curriculum of its kind for children aged 5 – 11 years old. It is delivered in the classroom by teachers, not psychologists. Early universal proactive and preventative intervention. 250 detailed lesson plans, each has powerpoints, handouts, and resources, and there’s an online training program. Community of CBSers in Bristol, including Freddy Jackson Browne, Katie Parker, Nic Hooper, Corinna Grindle and Emily Goyen who were fundamental to developing the vision of CONNECT. As Duncan said, this vision is “to get psychological flexibility into the waters of children’s lives, and into the bloodstream of humanity, if you like, proactively and preventatively, as early as possible, without waiting for things to go wrong.” He reported that there is a Connect research team starting this September at Bangor University. This will consist of one PhD student and two M.Res students. All of these programs will take place under the supervision of Professor Carl Hughes, who is the Head of the School of Education and also runs their M.Sc in Applied Behaviour Analysis. The team is also working in partnership with ten research schools in the South of England, with whom they are conducting early, qualitative, feasibility studies over the next six months, to better understand the experiences of teachers delivering Connect and children taking part in the curriculum. Essentially, Duncan expects a ten year research journey, starting with small scale projects and culminating in large scale RCTs. Exciting times at Connect! Their early feedback is looking great and they expect to publish some of their data within the next 6-12 months. You can listen to our interview here.
What’s Up with the Board?
We on the Board have been working very hard on a number of things to make ACBS a better home for us all. For more information about what’s going on this month, see the ACBS Monthly Newsletter here.
With respect to the Board, we did not meet in January. I wanted to highlight some projects and initiatives that we’ve worked on in December 2020:
• We approved two exceptional scientists, Marianna Zacharia and Samuel Spencer as our grant recipients. Congratulations, and thank you for working to extend the contextual behavioral science! To read more about these two investigators or their projects, see here.
• We have been working to finalize projects that will strengthen the four pillars of ACBS: centering our science, supporting competency in our science and practice, improving our digital presence, and empowering our community. We are incredibly grateful to the leads and champions on each of these pillars who are heading these efforts. To find out more about these initiatives and the ACBS members involved, see here.
• We have been working with the Conference Strategy Committee and our two conference Chairs, Maria Karekla and Rhonda Merwin, and putting together a fantastic online World Conference this summer! Our conference theme is Broadening Our Vision: Using CBS to Nurture a Just and Sustainable World. For more information about the 2021 Virtual World Conference, see here.
• We are working with the DEI Committee to put together a Request for Proposals to move ACBS to reflect upon our current state to become a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive home for all of our members, across our many different professions, in our many nations, around the world. Watch this space for more as the year unfolds.
• We appreciate the involvement of our many talented and committed members on various committees in ACBS and are mindful that some roles can be quite work-intensive. Thus, we made clearer that co-Chairs were welcome to help share the work, and outlined a chair selection process.
So many exciting things going on!
With kindness,
Lisa Coyne, President, ACBS Board of Directors