Petros is about teaching and supporting resilience
Petros brings an unparalleled wealth of expertise to the private, corporate and public sector, as the team support people of all ages and from all walks of life to live more resilient, balanced and productive lives.
A not-for-profit company, all our profits are put to work supporting some of the most vulnerable and damaged in our society, who would otherwise be unable to access this level of support.
Meet the people behind Petros.
Jo Clarke PhD, C.Psychol., AFBPsS, EuroPsy
Founder and Director
During 23 years of working as a (now former) forensic psychologist in the criminal justice system, Jo’s attention focused on the concept of resilience, both for individuals and the organisations in which they live and/or work.
For criminal justice staff, questions about surviving or thriving in roles that often involve exposure to potential trauma, led Jo to undertake a PhD in the area. Since its completion in 2004, she has worked with a wide variety of organizations and individuals applying research evidence to practice, to enhance psychological well-being.
Jo is a regular speaker and trainer, nationally and internationally, on the subject of individual and organizational resilience and has authored a number of chapters and papers on the subject. Committed to life-long learning, she remains abreast of current research and developments in the area, and with her dedicated team, strives do continually develop evidence-based interventions to promote thriving at work and at life.
In addition to developing Petros Programmes, Jo is the European Master trainer for Dr Derek Roger’s unique Challenge of Change Resilience training, allowing her to deliver and accredit the programme across Europe. She is also the only UK based accredited practitioner of Dr Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, working with parents and professionals in their support of behaviourally challenging children.
Mum of a now adult daughter and a foster carer, Jo also has a menagerie of animals, including a therapy dog, and is enthusiastic equestrian. She can regularly be found atop her horse, contemplating the next innovation (that’s if she hasn’t fallen off!)
Laura Vialle
Business Manager
Laura is likely to be the person you speak to or connect with about training, event bookings, course programmes, diaries and logistics. Laura is also part of the marketing and communication support.
The admin glue for many years, local to York and with a young family, Laura ensures people are where they’re supposed to be, meetings diaried, deadlines are met and rooms booked, together with so much more! Please feel free to get in touch if you have any queries and Laura will respond as fast as she can.
Madison Clarke MA International Conflict Studies
Project Manager & Safeguarding Lead
Madison holds a BA in Theology and Religion from Durham University and an MA in War Studies from King’s College London, where she explored the complex intersection of faith and conflict. Her research experience is extensive, covering critical issues such as the Catholic Church sexual abuse crisis, Islamophobic hate crimes against Muslim women, and gender-based radicalisation in extremist propaganda.
With over ten years of experience working with children across various settings, Madison has also conducted research on children’s involvement in conflict. Her commitment to social justice extends to her work in the tech sector, where she has taken on roles focused on improving diversity and inclusion—a cause she remains deeply passionate about.
As the Project Manager and Safeguarding Lead at Petros, Madison oversees initiatives to protect children and adults within different sectors, such as education and religious organisations. Madison also synthesises data to recommend effective policies for clients.
Based in London, Madison enjoys Pilates and immersing herself in the city’s vibrant cultural arts scene in her spare time.
Petros Trainers
Di Gammage MA Core Process Psychotherapist UKCP
Registered Child & Adult PsychotherapistrnWith 25 years’ experience working in the area of trauma and abuse, Di is qualified in dramatherapy and play therapy. Di was invited onto the UK Council for Psychotherapy Child Register via the Northern School of Child Psychotherapy in recognition of her clinical experience and publications in child therapy.
Her adult training is in Buddhist Psychotherapy. Di has been Co-director of Sirona Therapeutic Horsemanship Project, Devon, and has published and presented on the benefits of equine therapy, particularly for looked-after children who have experienced attachment breakdown. She lectures on the Terapia Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy programme in London, NESTT Psychotherapy Training in Yorkshire and Athryma Play and Dramatherapy Training in Athens.
Her interest in resilience has developed over years of practicing as a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor.
Di and Jo met as mums-to-be and their now grown-up daughters have also forged a deep friendship. Di also has a adult son and mediator partner.
Maxine Daniels DPsych., BSc (Hons),
BPA registered Senior Trainer, UKCP Registered Psychotherapist
Maxine has been an Associate with Petros for the past 5 years and really enjoys the work. She currently works as an Independent Consultant and Clinical Supervisor for the NHS, Broadmoor Hospital, Elysium Healthcare and the Priory Group. She completed her Doctorate in Psychotherapy at Metanoia/Middlesex University in 2012.
Maxine originally trained as an actress and went on to teach drama workshops in colleges and prisons. She qualified as a psychodrama psychotherapist in 2002. Maxine has consistently combined her arts background with clinical practice and business. She set up her own business, using drama-based learning and role play in organizations, which included clients such as St Thomas’s Hospital, Colgate/Palmolive, Philips Electronics, Lord Chancellor’s Dept, South East Rail Network, to name a few. In 1991 a paper was published titled: ‘The use of role play in teaching medical students obstetrics and gynaecology’ Coonar, Dooley, Daniels & Taylor, highlighting the use of actors in medical training, which led to an explosion of drama-based learning and the use of role-play in business.
During the last 25 years Maxine worked for HMPPS (Her Majesty’s Prison & Probation Services) where she consulted and developed offending behaviour treatment programmes and trained staff across the prison service establishment. This work has taken her to America, Scandinavia and Ireland. She is published in this field and has presented at many conferences both nationally and internationally.
Maxine currently teaches on the Doctorate for Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy programme and is an Academic Adviser for the Doctorate by Professional Studies at Metanoia. She teaches in Hong Kong on behalf of the London Centre for Psychodrama. She works in private practice and is registered with UKCP, MBACP and BPA professional membership bodies.
She is married to a professional musician and has two daughters, one who is following in her father’s footsteps by playing jazz trumpet, and her other daughter who is training to be a primary school teacher.
Mark Campion
After initially qualifying to be an interior designer in the early 80s, Mark eventually “stumbled” into a job in Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) clocking up over 30 years’ experience working in this area, as both a front line member of staff working within specialist units and as a wellbeing manager looking after the psychological wellbeing of staff who work in some of the most challenging environments the prison system has to offer.
In his latter role Mark has developed and delivered resilience and supervision training, as well as post incident staff care training to many staff within the Prison Service of England and Wales, including Northern Ireland. Well known for his committed and humorous approach, Mark also develops deep connections with both the groups and individuals he works with.
As a qualified mindfulness and meditation teacher, Mark teaches both Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and has also worked extensively with celebrated mindfulness author and teacher Shamash Alidina.
In 2017 Mark also qualified as an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapist with the EMDR Centre in London.. This relatively new, nontraditional type of psychotherapy has been found to be particularly helpful to people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
A resident of Manchester and life-long guitar player and semi-professional musician, within the next couple of years, Mark hopes to gain his private pilot’s licence.
Dr Glenn Russell FRCA
Glenn recently retired as Medical Director at the Liverpool Heart and Chest NHS Foundation Trust. During his ten-year tenure his own experience as a patient was a driver to focus on improving patient experience at the Trust. Working with an excellent Executive team he was able to develop a truly patient focussed culture at the Trust which is now always ranked in the top five in the National Inpatient survey each year. This, combined with demonstrable improvements in outcome and infection control led to the award of Foundation Trust of the year in 2013.
With this achievement came the realisation that peer leadership can be very rewarding – influencing the care many thousands of people receive. It does however, require individuals to step apart from their peer group which can be extremely challenging and consequently the tenure of clinical leadership in the NHS is often short. This specific insight led to Glenn developing focussed short leadership training modules for new and established clinical leaders. He has also trained as an Executive coach and is of the view that coaching is the link allows an individual to process more didactic leadership training in to real world solutions.
Glenn is an anaesthetist by trade and, following additional experience in Canada and Kenya, was appointed as a consultant at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital in 1990. Research and teaching have always been his interest and he was also appointed as Senior lecturer in Anaesthesia with the University of Liverpool. He has published his research widely and has been an invited speaker in more than 10 countries.
Anaesthesia is a high-risk speciality and during his career he worked with clinicians who witnessed or were directly involved in very traumatic events. Whilst simulation training can prepare for the practical aspects of these events, there is very little attention paid to the psychological welfare of individuals involved. This can have career ending consequence for some. The problem has been highlighted by the recent pandemic. Concern over the need to recognise and support the psychological needs of front line clinicians led Glenn to join the Petros family, hoping to bring a clinicians experience to Petros’s outstanding track record of supporting mind health and resilience training in other high risk organisations.
Glenn is married to Mary, an ex-Police officer and has a daughter Nicki, who is also an anaesthetist. When not training or coaching they are usually found hiking or cycling in the hills of Snowdonia.
Matthew Gammage
A qualified workplace mediator, Matthew supports people in conflict to maintain effective communication and avoid the human and organisational cost of personal and professional relationships deteriorating through misunderstanding and blame.
Over the past eight years, Matthew has successfully mediated conflicts in a broad range of sectors and situations: between colleagues at work; between senior managers and staff members; between neighbours; and between teenagers at risk of homelessness and their parents or carers. Whatever the context, Matthew is passionate about giving people the opportunity to find a way out of conflict and avoid the misery involved.
Matthew’s mission is always to create a safe space where both parties can hear each other and come to an agreement that will improve things for them both in the future. This also involves supporting both parties’ mental health in escaping the personal burden and reducing the cost of conflict for the organisation from stress-related absence, quitting, grievance procedures, investigations, tribunals and litigation.
Prior to mediation, for 20 years Matthew worked as a professional cameraman and also undertook training in psychotherapy, which informs his current role. Today, with two adult children forging their own paths, mediation skills are now only rarely called for at home and Matthew can lose hours tinkling the ivories and sharing life with a menagerie of domesticated creatures and psychotherapist wife, Di.
Ed Simpson
Ed joined the Police Service in 1995, initially working for West Yorkshire Police in his hometown of Bradford, before transferring to North Yorkshire Police in 2003. Ed then remained at North Yorkshire Police until his retirement in 2016 on medical grounds, following a prolonged battle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression.
During his service Ed was well known for his caring and compassionate policing style, maintaining a victim focus and, through his work as a dedicated Neighbourhood Police Officer, always striving to bring local communities together.
Ed was also a Police Family Liaison Officer working with families whose loved ones had died as a result of road traffic Collisions, murder or manslaughter. It was dealing with one particular family’s grief that Ed developed PTSD. However, it wasn’t until four years later, in 2012, while Ed was working as a Custody Sergeant in York, that this developed into a severe episode of depression that almost cost him his life.
On return to work Ed took the decision to be open with colleagues about why he had been absent (not something spoken about in the emergency services at that time). He expected to be the only sufferer, but he found quite the opposite to be true.
Ed now speaks about his career experience to audiences all over the country, working closely with the national mental health charity MIND on their Blue Light program, aimed at raising awareness and challenging the stigma of mental health illness within the emergency services. Despite his eventual medical retirement, after 21 years’ experience as a Police Officer, Ed continues to tell his story to public and private organisations, to educate, inform and inspire.
Importantly, Ed is also a stay-at-home-dad with two school-aged children, both of whom love to provide him with plenty of new daily challenges.
Laura Bowden
Petros Professional Advisors & Consultants
Tracy Brookes, MSc., C.Psychol.
HCPC Registered Forensic Psychologist
With a background in Forensic Psychology and two decades working within the criminal justice system, including prison, mental health and wider community, Tracy is chartered by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and registered by the Health Professions Council (HPC).
Tracy has been involved in both the assessment and treatment of offenders, delivery of national training to a range of professions and become involved in supporting other trainee psychologists in their route towards qualification with the BPS and HPC.
More recently, Tracy has worked as a Lecturer at The University of York which led to her contribution to a publication. She continues to work directly with offenders and staff, working as a practitioner in a medium secure unit.
It is through her experiences of working with offenders, as well as being a parent to two school-aged children, which has led to her desire to improve the support offered to challenging children and their parents!
Jenny Terry, BA (Hons) MRes PGCert FHEA MBPsS
Doctoral Researcher & Tutor, School of Psychology University of Sussex
Jenny’s PhD combines her enthusiasm for improving research methods in psychology – particularly psychological measurement – with her substantive interests in the role emotions play in education by exploring the psychometric properties of maths and statistics anxieties.
Prior to her PhD, Jenny spent two years designing and delivering training in academic resilience to staff and students at the University of Brighton and researching the effectiveness of the training. She has also published research on mental health and wellbeing more broadly. Before returning to university as a mature student, Jenny worked in recruitment, training, and forensic mental health.
Jenny is a qualified teacher in higher education, a Higher Education Authority Fellow, and has several years experience teaching research methods, statistics, and social psychology. She is also a member of the BPS Research Board and the Mathematical, Statistical, and Computing Psychology Section Committee.
Jenny is excited to have joined the Petros team to support the development of a psychometric scale to measure resilience in the workplace.
Like the rest of the Petros team, she is also a parent. In her case, to a (mostly!) delightful pre-teenage daughter.
2021 – Current Chair of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG)
Founder of RoSE (Researchers of Statistics Education) Network
Ned Hoste FRSA
Brand and communications
Ned started his first business at 14, then at 15 as a professional designer on a national magazine and has never lost the buzz. After studying Graphic Design at art college for 4 years moved on to work in-house at a London publisher. He set up 2H design in 1986 and has worked on book projects for all the mainstream UK publishers and many international projects with authors as diverse as Kirk Douglas, Jeffrey Archer, Jilly Cooper and The Rolling Stones.
In 2007, Ned set up the Big Ideas Collective (BIG), with co-director Jacky Fitt; a virtual agency specialising in brand development and articulation of brand messages on and offline. We work with businesses all over the UK working long term with companies and organizations helping to build brands based on values. BIG has won 2 major green awards for their business model, The Green Dot Award in 2008 and the Green Award from Investors in the Environment in 2016.
The BIG philosophy is to work with sustainable businesses with a particular interest in social enterprises that understand that enterprise has to work in balance with the social, and without the enterprise the social part of the business will not be sustainable.
2014 BIG launched The Big Ideas Library to publish Independent authors book to the standard of the mainstream publishers.
Ned now also runs TEDx workshops and spoken on the Goldman Sachs 20K small business programme on the good business module and is ILM qualified. He is also now running part time creativity workshops for Medical students at Exeter University Medical School.
Proud father of Katy and partner to mosaic artist Alison Hepburn, Ned has known Jo since Katy and Madi were about 6 months old.
Jacky Fitt FRSA
Editor
Award winning author, editor and copywriter, Jacky’s work is all about listening, understanding and articulating ideas and concepts through words; persuasive, engaging and informative. Raising profiles and profitability online and in print.
Co-founder and Director of The Big Ideas Collective and business education series the Principles of Profit with graphic designer Ned Hoste, Jacky is also the founder of Micro Oiseau, a multi-language, world-wide marketing support website for microentrepreneurs and showcase for enterprising translators.
A TEDx speaker, Jacky’s first book, How to Get Inside Someone’s Mind and Stay There won the 2015 Small Business Book Community Choice Award in Marketing. The book, now fully revised, is currently published by Business Expert Press in the US and is available in print and download here.
Jacky is a mum of two amazing young women who are a constant source of love, exhaustion and fun.
Tom Lininsh
Personal Trainer
Physical health, fitness and well being have been at the heart of Tom’s life for long as he can remember. With over 12 years’ experience as a fitness professional, Tom’s goal is the provision of physical health training to people of all ages and abilities, from elite athletes training for specific events, to the over-70s who may have never trained before.
Tom’s philosophy is simple. He believes that physical health and wellbeing are a holistic process. His practice is collaborative and multi-disciplinary and he also believes that training for physical health and fitness can take place anywhere and that anyone can train, whatever their history or ability. In recent years this has led to an increasing interest in working with people who might previously have been excluded from fitness because of poor health or chronic illness. Tom is passionate about the difference that fitness and lifestyle changes can make to people’s lives, wellbeing and happiness.
Tom lives with his wife, two children, dogs and many hens near York.