As a radical experiment in working it out together – peer-based and self-managing, working with our clients in long-term partnership and with practitioners in free association – we are not only surviving, but thriving.
Oasis has been supporting and developing people in organisations since 1989. From our beginnings as a coming together of co-founders Bryce Taylor and Nick Ellerby, who were both working in the field of human relations providing freelance training and consultancy support to organisations in the public sphere – education, social and health care – we always had a commitment to a humanistic approach and self and peer assessment methods.
The experiment started when Bryce put out a call to create a ‘peer-based’ entity, inviting 22 people to explore the possibilities of building a new experimental enterprise designed and run collaboratively as peers. Oasis came into being in 1989 and moved to Beechwood Conference Centre, Leeds, before finding its current home in Hall Mews, Boston Spa, in 1995.
Over the years thousands of people have been through our development programmes and we have sold tens of thousands of copies of our books, published through Oasis Press, with the most popular being Working With Others – one of the most successful counselling publications in the UK.
We have developed proprietary frameworks including the Seven Stage Model of Effective Human Relations and the Whole Person Learning approach.