What is our ‘Not-For-Profit’ policy
and VHE ethos?

We want to open doors for people, to create opportunities and spark some deeper thinking about how we teach and how we can heal.

We are aiming to provide the voice and singing community with the understanding that good health is not a given, we want to accept that things go wrong sometimes, and therefore to provide a biopsychosocial framework of help for all voice users who need it. Vocal Health Education is bigger than the sum of its parts; it is not centred on any individual personality, it is about connection over recognition. Our aim is to facilitate a deeper, stronger, wiser and more useful way to think.

From Stephen King: The Biopsychosocial Model (1977) as a vessel to see the sum of the interactive parts of an illness that predates DL Sackett’s “evidence based medicine (EBM) model from 1996. I’m gonna try and consolidate 3 years worth of reading and study of this philosophy in 6 points…

1. The Biopsychosocial (BPS) Model is the creation of George Engel (1977), who said, “We are now faced with the necessity and the challenge to broaden the approach to disease to include the psychosocial without sacrificing the enormous advantages of the biomedical approach”. Whilst an Evidence Based Medicine diagram compartmentalises medicine into three constituent parts; the patient’s wishes, fears, preferences are only seen as one third of the importance of any given interaction.
2. The BPS model however looks at the biology, psychology and sociology of any given whole interaction with a patient. This means taking into account such things as social status, living conditions, criminal record, schooling, locations growing up, mental health, anxieties and stressors in day to day life, as well as the drug effects, genetic predispositions and biomechanical issues that may befall a patient.
3. Since 1977, there have been consistent calls to action to relight the fire of the BPS model in healthcare and medicine, including high quality meta analysis, systematic Cochrane reviews.
4. We believe that aligning to this philosophy gives power to understanding the complexity of any given voice. Sure, someone may come into the clinic with hoarseness from mucosal pathology, but how do they feel about that? How does that worry impact oedemitus cycles in the vocal folds? How does all of that worry manifest itself within muscle tension in the neck? The breathing apparatus…?
5. The interdigitation is endless but also informs where one might begin with mindfulness and meditation before any exercises with a ‘mechanism of action’ are given.
6. Or, perhaps even considering their story of abuse as a child that Manual Therapy in the neck region might be triggering or psychologically dangerous.

It’s all about the story which leads work alongside a biomedical diagnosis. It’s something that many of us do quite well anyway, it’s just nice to know it has a name!

PS it’s easy to say “I do this anyway” without truly reflecting on the complexity of any given person. In fact, Walt Fritz PT, Dr Rani Lill Anjum (who wrote the book on Causation) and Stephen have a chat about this very subject through CauseHealth here.

“My aim is to nurture other teachers to become the best that they can, which will be better than I could do it, so that I can slip away and watch the magic from a distance. I’m always happy to hang around and mentor or just chat, but I have absolutely no desire for either fame or fortune. My ultimate pleasure is to watch a student of mine take off and fly to somewhere beyond any place that I could imagine.” Jenevora

Our tutors and assessors are very carefully chosen for their qualifications, experience and their understanding of the philosophy behind our training. They will each bring their own take on this, but we have regular standardisation meetings to ensure parity between their assessments.

We have a wonderful team of people who share the same passion for change and a commitment to the provision of high quality education. We are all easily accessible, we will deal with queries promptly and we will treat every personal interaction with the same respect for the needs of the individual.

Above all, VHE values the personal relationships and individuality each member of the team brings to this organisation. Being your authentic self helps us all understand each other, and feel greater levels of congruence and transparency within the the work we share. Our Staff Handbook is here.

Each course is priced with the tutor/ presenter fee of 50%, a 10% administration fee, a 20% profit margin for reinvestment into the company (see below) plus a VAT fee of 20%.

Each of the presenters for our video course content gets paid the exact same fee for the 15 minute video contribution. Some of them produce the material very quickly, some spend hours preparing. Some are very busy and well-known, others are emerging. Some are on comfortable salaries, others are freelance.

We respect all of them equally. Each presenter has ownership of their content – they can present the same material anywhere. We have a licensed agreement to use their film for one year. At the end of that, they can either withdraw it, let us keep using it, or update the content and receive a further fee.

All of our staff are either on freelance, or PAYE employment contracts and get remunerated on an hourly basis for their time. This includes administrators, course managers, presenters, assessors, tutors, mentors and the directors. The fees are equal across the company. At present, VHE has written over 50 freelance contracts.

Both of the company directors are remunerated for their time. They are paid an administration fee at the UK’s set minimum wage, and then are paid in line with the tutors should they be teaching for VHE. The VHE administrators are all remunerated at the same fee of £20 per hour.

If excess profit is left in the company, the money is reinvested into creating new course content, or providing expert outreach work. It is the intention of VHE to pursue bursaries and grants to provide education for those without unearned advantage.

“Not-for-profit organisation” is a broad term for all independent organisations whose purpose is something other than to make private profit for directors, members or shareholders. Many different types of organisation can be “not-for-profit”. It is not a legal structure in and of itself. Not-for-profit organisations choose a legal structure based on a variety of factors, including:

• How the organisation will be funded
  Whether the organisation will be controlled by voting members
• Whether the organisation will be incorporated
• Whether the organisation will be charitable