The research and recognition project started formally with the presentation that I made at the IASH conference in San Francisco in September of 2006. Since then it has exceeded our wildest hopes and gone from a concept to a growing organization. I thought it might be good here to give a glimpse of what’s happened and what we’re going to need to keep it going.

If you review the action plan you’ll see we have accomplished Stage One and leapfrogged past funding in Stage Two to concrete developments in a number of areas such as; research grants (2.5 million dollar PTSD grant proposal); the largest online library of NLP articles (set to rollout shortly); an application to introduce some of the most serious clinical research scientists to NLP and our research ideas at the annual ISTSS Conference; an NLP in house American university presence (Marshall University, West Virginia); an attempt at a clinical example of NLP excellence (PTSD treatment Grant for Iraq war veterans); a serious internet marketing plan that among other things will inform forty thousand NLP supporters of the project; and organizational/operational possibilities, (especially in the area of grant writing), that could make good use of a million dollar a year operating budget.

Chronologically I thought it would take at least two years to get near here. This is all stretching our initial volunteer core pretty thin. Jerry Beach, Dee Kinder, Steve Andreas, Tom Hoobyar, Barbara Lockhart, Tim Hallbom, Rick Gray, Tom Dotz, myself, and a dozen others including the IASH Executive Board, have all been giving the kind of time and energy that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Behind the scenes I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is an idea whose time has come. The quality and quantity of the energy coming from the working team and volunteers is unique in my personal history. Perhaps it’s the common NLP backgrounds or my own joy in doing something I feel so strongly about…but whatever…it’s just been downright fun most of the time. Yes, there are of course those “other” times. I’m not used to having a backlog of 250 e-mails to answer or of doing something this large without a full time “administrative assistant.” Where are you these days dear Helen? Surely retirement in Florida couldn’t be as much fun as starting a forty million dollar, not for profit, research organization from scratch with no money! (She trained me to look like a well oiled executive in the 70’s but it’s never been clearer to me how much of “my” substance was in her care for the details.)

With the support of over thirty NLP Institutes formally assisting the project, I believe we have come a long way toward proving the projects first basic concept, namely, that the hundreds of thousands of trained and knowledgeable NLP supporters worldwide have the skills, motivation and resources to begin this job when the framework necessary to do this are made available. In addition to the Institutes, over two hundred individuals have signed up to volunteer their time and skills to the project. When the PTSD Grant and a few others on the drawing board are completed and published the second premise will take a serious step forward, namely, that the NLP materials themselves when researched and able to be compared with other established clinical tools will generate the support necessary for continued NLP growth and development.

Our priorities now must be to keep the projects we have started going with a larger, well organized group of volunteers and fund an infrastructure of offices and administrative core staff. I ask all of you reading this to picture our initial needs and sign up here on the website if your personal ecology lines up with some of those needs. If you don’t jump right in, keep yourself energized by giving us your suggestions, ideas and feedback. As my newly adopted “Uncle” Steve Andreas would say “None of us is as smart alone, as all of us together.” Help us grow into a genuine service to NLP Practitioners and those they serve. I’ll try to keep you informed of developments in “Uncle Franks Blog” here on the website and thanks for your interest.