2022 Annual Report - ACBS Foundation

Dear ACBS members,

On behalf of the board of the ACBS Foundation I want to sincerely thank you for the invaluable support that you continue to provide for our shared mission. Our members are at the core of what makes us great and why we have so much potential to make change in the future.

We provide funds to people and projects who would otherwise not have access to funding. Through this, we serve our worldwide community by funding social/community initiatives and CBS research projects related to the environment, improving diversity, equity, and inclusion, and addressing institutional racism in real life contexts. Our work is focused on ending global disparities.

As I’m sure you recall, the ACBS Foundation was established thanks to the generous donation of two longtime members, Jason Luoma and Jenna LeJeune. This donation was used as the basis for the Aaron S. Luoma Fund for Global Equity, which funds any initiatives matching its mission via the annual Foundation Grant.

More recently, in December 2022, Mavis Tsai and Barbara Kohlenberg have very generously initiated a second grant award program called the Robert (Bob) J. Kohlenberg Research Award. This fund is specifically designed to support graduate student and early career research focused on advancing knowledge and expertise in Functional Analytic Psychotherapy or its dissemination to the general public via the Awareness, Courage & Love Global Project.

We’re proud to say that we’re already making an impact. Some of the steps we achieved over the last year include:

- Awarding two Foundation Student Scholarships to attend the ACBS Virtual World Conference. To read about the impact the Foundation scholarship had for the 2022 recipients, click here.

- Awarding the second ACBS Foundation grant to Wenqian ZHAO, PhD Candidate of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR, China) and her supervisors (Prof. Wai Tong CHIEN and Prof. Yuen Yu CHONG) for Miss ZHAO’s PhD research on Effectiveness of online ACT-based program for breast cancer survivors on improving body image disturbance. To read more click here.

The ACBS Foundation board wish to expressly thank everyone who helped facilitate this work by making a donation or by peer reviewing all of the funding applications that we received. If you have not done so already, please consider volunteering to be a peer reviewer for our grant applications in 2023. To learn more about the ACBS Foundation, please click here.

We look forward to continuing the momentum this year and beyond in order to further support existing CBS activities and explore areas for future development.

Kind regards,
Nigel Vahey

office_1 January 25, 2023 - 9:23am