Hello Everyone
We are so excited to tell you that myself, as Acting Chair, Jon Matson-Higgins, as Acting Vice Chair and the Management Committee are upgrading and changing so many things for the good of the UK Reiki Federation. The last four weeks have been and continue to be, very busy with these changes and we ask for your understanding whilst we continue to build the UKRF into an even bigger and better organisation for you to belong to.
Annie Harrington stepped down from being Chair at the end of October, after five years of taking the UK Reiki Federation forward, for which we thank her for her efforts. Jon, myself and the Management Committee will be furthering that objective and are really looking forward to presenting you all with the projects being discussed and the vision that we hold for taking the UK Reiki Federation into the 21st century.
A little background information about us, I have been on the Management Committee since 2011 and have been Vice Chair for five years. When Annie left, I stepped up to Acting Chair and Jon stepped up as Acting Vice Chair. Jon has been a UK Reiki Federation member for many years and had joined the Management Committee this year. Together with our wonderful Management Committee, we are passionate about bringing you, the Members, the best experience of belonging to the largest Reiki organisation in the UK.
As with any change, we are undergoing a complete review of how the UK Reiki Federation currently runs, we are creating a clear ‘business plan’, looking at modernising many areas of the current structure, with an eco-friendly overview, which includes more online forms, certificates and brochures, creating low cost databases in the office where all our information is currently being stored, which will speed up response times when dealing with any queries presented to us. To that end, we have now secured a modern, fully serviced and smaller office, with great transport links, in Croydon, where we will now be based. Moving offices allows us to be more accessible to our members too.
Our new address is: UK Reiki Federation, Suite 437, 4th Floor, Davis House, Robert Street, Croydon, CR0 1QQ.
Our new phone number is 0203 432 6827.
We are currently creating a new cloud-based database and would ask that if you do not receive an email from us in the next week, that you contact the office to let them know on [email protected]
We have advertised for and found some amazing new Management Committee members, sourced from the UKRF membership and we will be announcing a who’s who very shortly.
We have started an overhaul of the UK Reiki Federation website, making it more user friendly, which includes how we can make the renewal process easier for members. We have added a full complaints process to the website, which is a requirement for any professional body and we are also updating a number of policies which were outdated.
Education is an area the UK Reiki Federation pride themselves on and we are reviewing how we can make the system easier to use and speed up the processes that can at present, take some time. We are very proud to say that we only have fully qualified teachers and assessors as part of this team and will be expanding the team in the next few weeks. The UK Reiki Federation is the only Reiki Professional body who use fully qualified assessors to assess all Reiki courses to make sure that they meet the required National Occupational Standards.
We are also working on a large number of Reiki CPD courses, both online and face to face and will be announcing these in due course. If you provide courses that you feel would benefit our members, then do please get in touch with us at [email protected] and we can discuss this further.
We are also looking at how money is being spent within the UK Reiki Federation and how we can streamline and manage this better, thus allowing more money for other projects that will benefit our members. One such area is research. Jon and I met with the UK Reiki Federation Research team and they, now headed by Torsten Lange (who is passionate about researching the effects of Reiki), are currently looking at some great new research and collating existing research. This is brilliant and will help to give reiki greater understanding and credibility.
Sue Malcolm has done and is doing fantastic work with Animal Reiki and confirming the standards needed to meet the requirements of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Sue recently raised some money by running a marathon and again this will be used to research more studies of Animal Reiki.
We have a huge number of Reiki Practitioners as members and we hope to provide more support in the way of useful information to assist you in the day to day running of your practices and we are currently looking at how we can achieve this. We are also mindful of members who practice Reiki on themselves, family and friends, without going into professional practice and we are discussing ways we can offer support to you too.
For many years the UK Reiki Federation have been part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Integrated Healthcare, which is currently being restructured, as our present Government has been dissolved. We have made a commitment that we will be part of the new organisation, Integrated Healthcare Collaborative (IHC) and look forward to being part of the group that will be looking at ways the UK works with complementary therapies, such as Reiki.
The UK Reiki Federation has already adopted Connecting Reiki with Medicine as its chosen charity and we are going to be keeping you informed as to how this groundbreaking initiative is progressing. Both myself and Sarah Laing are part of the Reiki Team at St George’s University Hospital, London and we’ll be writing ongoing articles about this groundbreaking project. Robust clinical research is the way for the medical profession to realise the efficacy of Reiki in acute medical settings and the Connecting Reiki with Medicine research will be able to deliver this much needed evidence. Imagine a world where Reiki is accepted as a truly integrated therapy and partner to medicine! Please do look at our website for more details https://www.totalgiving.co.uk/mypage/ukrf-crwm
Jon, I and the rest of the Management Committee would like to impress upon you that we are approachable, transparent and respectful and that we are working tirelessly to make sure the UK Reiki Federation grows from strength to strength. We work with the Principles/Precepts and are guided by these in all areas of running this organisation. We have a long way to go, Rome wasn’t built in a day, however, from all of the Management Committee, we would like to thank you for all your support. We are a dedicated group of volunteers that have the UK Reiki Federation and all our members very much in the forefront of our vision.
We are also very much open to ideas that you, the Members, may have as to how we can better serve you. We would like to create the UKRF as a loving, supportive community, with Reiki at the very heart of everything we do and to that end we welcome any suggestions and comments you may have, which can be sent to [email protected] or [email protected]
