My colleague Sharon Bond, who has died aged 77, was a social worker and family psychotherapist in London before setting up her own therapy, consultation and training service, Chiron.
Starting out in 1985 as an education social worker for the London borough of Tower Hamlets, she was then for many years a principal psychiatric social worker with Hackney Child and Family Consultation Service, working with families and children in mental health clinics and with teachers in schools.
Sharon was in the vanguard of staking a claim as a black female in a field that had been dominated by white male clinicians. She was the first black woman to qualify as a family psychotherapy supervisor, and set up Chiron to help people who felt excluded by existing training institutions.
Her mission was to build up the self-belief of practitioners who had been made to feel they could never make the grade – and in doing so she brought many people into the family therapy profession who otherwise would not have completed the journey.
Sharon was born in Kitty in British Guiana (now Guyana), the second of the five children of Doreen (nee Mingo), a seamstress, and Jaslin Bond, an engineer. She came to the UK in 1957, aged nine, with her parents and an older sister, Yvonne. After her secondary schooling she became a member of the British Black Panthers, and created a Saturday supplementary school (named “Heads”) in east London to support black children who were being failed by the existing system. She also volunteered for West Indian World, the first widely distributed black weekly newspaper in the UK.
In 1985, after gaining a social work qualification from Goldsmiths College in south-east London, Sharon began working as an education social worker in Tower Hamlets before moving on to the Hackney Child and Family Consultation Service in 1989. She qualified as a family psychotherapist in 1993, and while still working in Hackney she set up Chiron in 1997, leaving in 2003 to concentrate on running the service as its director. She never retired, and continued with Chiron up to her death.
Over the years Sharon held a number of other positions while carrying on her core work, including clinical director at the Kensington Consultation Centre in London (where she had done her family psychotherapy training), visiting lecturer in family therapy at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and external examiner for the master’s degree courses in family therapy at the Institute of Family Therapy in London and Birmingham University. In 2006 she gained a doctorate in systemic psychotherapy from the Tavistock Clinic in London.
Across everything she did, Sharon was a strong, assertive woman and a gentle soul who was committed to empowering and supporting people facing racism and discrimination. There are many whose lives have been enriched and healed by her passion, generosity, dedication and spirit.
She is survived by a son, Darren, a granddaughter, Nia, her siblings Yvonne, Mikloth, Sheril and Eglah, and her partner, Alex Smith.
