Costa, Beverley

After training as an individual counsellor and psychotherapist, Dr Beverley Costa set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) to meet a gap she observed, in services for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters within Mothertongue and in 2010 she established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum. Beverley founded The Pasalo Project in 2017 www.pasaloproject.org to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. In 2013, Beverley established “Colleagues Across Borders”: a project in which professionals offer peer support, pro bono and via remote platforms, to refugee psychosocial workers and interpreters based mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading and she has written a number of papers and chapters on therapy across languages. With Professor Jean Marc Dewaele, she won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award. Beverley has delivered training and supervision to statutory and voluntary sector health and social care organisations for the past two decades and has produced two anthologies of interpreters’ stories and a play about a couple in a cross-language relationship, for the Soho Theatre, London. She co-founded the performance group of interpreters, Around the Well, in 2018. She wrote and produced the film Language of the Heart and her book Other Tongues – psychological therapies in a multilingual world was published in 2020 by PCCS Books.