18 October 2023

Rachael Hanley Browne, President of EMCC UK, and Hannah Butler, Director for Coaching Practice, share further details about Festival 2024, the EMCC UK online conference which takes place on 23 April 2024.

Festival 2024 has been created to offer coaches, mentors and supervisors time to pause, reflect and learn. We live and work in demanding times. Our attention is often distracted, and we are pulled in many directions. Therefore, we may not prioritise meaningful, or potentially transformational,  professional development. This is why we have chosen the following title:

Evolving Contexts: Opportunities and challenges for professional practice – pause, reflect and learn

Festival 2024 will be eclectic in its approach. We offer you an opportunity to plant, nurture and grow your professional practice across the fields of coaching, mentoring and supervision. We’ll be inviting you to join us as we seek to develop in knowledge, skill, and practice. Our festival will also offer time to pause and reflect on innovative research, and its potential influence on how we coach, mentor, or supervise.

We have planned this event with you, our members, in mind. We want to invite you, and those contemplating membership, to engage in a day of reflection, exploration, and development. And to celebrate what a wonderful profession we share.

Festival 2024 will be arranged around six streams, which we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks, offering a range of topics for a range of interests. You will be able to select the two streams most relevant to your practice and hear from peers in your field. Together we will explore the opportunities and challenges of our evolving context, and build a better and stronger community of coaches, mentors, and supervisors.

A diversity of voices

We have previously relied on a few voices in our field, who have pioneered the way for our profession. We stand on the shoulders of these committed patrons. But now we want to reach beyond and into the future, by bringing a fresh approach and a diversity of voices to our festival. We have a unique opportunity to consider what might flourish, take wing, and fly in the future.

Embracing this diversity will elevate our community, invite us to challenge what we believe, and encourage us to lean into this new world. Our day together will be about celebrating diversity in all its glorious forms.

Your Festival experience

Our day opens with a welcome from our President and an invitation to explore the boundaries and outer territories of our practice. You’ll have access to six core subject areas, and you’ll select two of them, covering one in the morning, and the second in the afternoon.

We look forward to sharing more details soon as we prepare for tickets to go on sale.

Each core subject area will deliver:

• Knowledge exchange – here, a speaker will explore current research and practice. In this session we will explore newly emerging topic areas.

• Up-skilling – we will engage with and reflect on this new material, and explore our practice together.

• Application – through the focus of a case study or panel discussion, we will investigate how others have adapted what we are learning into their practice. We will explore lessons learnt, the opportunities and challenges faced, and how these have shaped them.

We will close with a session by our Director for CPD, who will outline how our learning and reflexivity can build our CPD profile, and where relevant, our accreditation.

Join us in creating our future together!

Images by Michael Fousert and Getty Images on Unsplash