Dear Members and Friends of ACTO,
As this newsletter is being released, we are still feeling warm as we reminisce about the Annual Conference held online June 19-21, 2025. The strong sense of an ACTO community was palpable. Many sessions included pairing people together or placing them in small groups to dialogue, sharing more of themselves. This went a long way in supporting the sense of our global community, with several countries represented. This heightened our awareness that ACTO is an international organization striving to give voice to a variety of coaching approaches from different cultures and world views.
The conference theme, HUMANS FIRST, was ever present throughout plenary and concurrent sessions. The speakers gently held space to explore our individual and collective identities with curiosity, openness, and vulnerability. We were able to hold two realities, which is the paradox of diversity, “We are all human like everyone else AND we are unique individuals unlike anyone else in the world”.
Based on the evaluative feedback we have received from the conference participants, the ACTO HUMANS FIRST Conference was rated a 9.2 on a scale of 10.
This conference was the perfect launching platform for ACTO to continue to foster the conversations that will place us on the leading edge of coaching the “whole person,” which includes the intersections of our various identities. In any given coaching conversation, the person sitting before us is comprised of a vertical identity, where the roots go back many generations of which that person is the fruit, with hereditary traits, e.g. race, gender, ethnicity, class; AND a horizontal identity where they have chosen their circles of association, e.g. profession, education, religion. All these identities make the “whole person.” ACTO continues to forge ahead and advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and accessibility as so beautifully stated in the ACTO Stand:
“ACTO is committed to creating diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in the coaching profession through calling forth, honoring, and inviting the uniqueness of all individuals and diverse life experiences.
In support of this stand, we acknowledge and are committed to eliminating the negative impact of personal and systemic bias, privilege, and oppression, which may be conscious or unconscious, intentional, or unintentional, overt, or subtle.”
For those of you who attended the conference, we invite you to attend the post-conference networking session on July 2. For those of you who could not attend, we remind you that the session recordings will be available.
Finally, we want to offer our gratitude and appreciation for the organizations (shown below) who agreed to sponsor this year’s conference. We would not have been nearly as successful without your generous support!
As we have mentioned in our previous messages, the Board has been testing a new Leadership Structure over the past six months. Our approach has been more of a team process, allowing us to be very agile. We have evaluated this way of being and will begin to move towards it permanently in the fall. This very successful conference has been a proven deliverable that serves to inform our strategic direction as we move into the future.
Thank you for your ongoing support. We need you. The world needs you.
The ACTO Board
