Clare McNeill

Clare McNeill is Head of Service. Clare has worked as a manager across the third and private sectors, alongside roles in health, education, and social care. She brings both professional and lived experience of a range of services, including support for unpaid carers, children with complex needs, and fostering and adoption, and has delivered workforce training on a variety of subjects.

As Head of Service, Clare hopes to lead the whole team forward in supporting women and girls across the city, engaging with other gendered services and drawing on her experience and knowledge. Clare is committed to supporting the team at WCTS to deliver a positive, compassionate, and high‑quality service for women in Leeds.

Sophia Ulhaq

Sophia is one of our Service Managers, responsible for the Perinatal Service. She manages the therapists and ensures the services run smoothly. She has experience as a manager in the third sector working with people who face barriers to support such as refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. Due to previous roles working with and advocating for marginalised groups including neurodiverse, LGBTQIA+, disabled and ethnically diverse communities, she is passionate about delivering inclusive services for women from all backgrounds.

Laura MacNay

Laura is part of our Services Administrator Team, supporting therapists with admin tasks and creating a calm and welcoming space for clients when they arrive for their appointments. She cares about people being able to access the support they need for their mental health. In previous roles, she worked at a communications agency in Germany and until recently ran a small translation business, so enjoys working with people from different backgrounds.

Mihaela Rosca

Mihaela is a BACP-accredited counsellor and psychotherapist working in the WCTS Perinatal Team. Her approach is relational, person-centred, and trauma-informed. She works with clients facing a wide range of challenges, with a particular focus on their relationship with themselves. Her holistic approach explores thoughts, feelings, behaviours, bodily sensations, and family systems—recognising how upbringing, culture, and environment shape the way we experience the world. Whether someone is navigating loss, relationship difficulties, anxiety, low self-esteem, or unresolved past experiences, she tailors therapy to each individual’s unique needs. Clients often leave sessions feeling lighter, more self-aware, and better equipped to navigate life with confidence and clarity. Mihaela has extensive experience working in private practice and mental health organizations.

Alice Franks

Alice is a integrative EMDR Therapist and Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT) Practitioner, accredited under the BACP. She works in the 8-16 team, offering a brief psycho-dynamic approach for her DIT clients, working on themes such as relationship issues, low self-esteem, abuse, and long-term depression and anxiety. She also offers Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) for clients who present with PTSD, severe anxiety and phobias. This somatic therapy aims to reduce symptoms and helps process and recover from past experiences that are affecting your mental health and wellbeing.

Alice has built her psychotherapy career working in women’s services, specialising in domestic abuse recovery and childhood trauma, and aims for her clients to leave feeling empowered, safe, and hopeful.

Sue Allen

Sue is a Counsellor/Psychotherapist using Transactional Analysis and is Accredited with BACP. She will help you to piece together the parts of your ‘life map’ which are feeding into your current problems, as it is often our earliest experiences which lead us to our conclusions about ourselves, others and what is possible for us in life. Sometimes buried feelings may emerge, and the therapy relationship is central to this work. Sue’s approach is warm, calm and compassionate and she believes in supporting people to grow through a journey of self-understanding and self-acceptance. Before counselling and psychotherapy training, Sue worked with Looked After Children in Local Authority children’s residential units and then practiced for several years as a Children and Families Social Worker supporting families. To deepen her understanding of families and relationships, she completed initial foundational training in Family and Systemic Therapy and then gained further skills in CBT and EMDR. Sue also works in private practice.

Lorraine Fothergill

Lorraine is an integrative person-centred psychotherapist with additional training in Dialectic Behaviour Therapy and other therapeutic approaches. She has extensive experience working in many different settings including Mind, NHS, and educational settings. She also has a private practice in York. She has great resolve to help clients make meaningful, lasting change and enable a resilient sense of well-being. She is a person with natural warmth and cares very much about the work clients are able to do with her. She has worked with a broad profile of clients bringing many different issues, none of whom are less important than another.

Alison Herbert

Alison is a qualified Art Psychotherapist. She is registered with The Health Care Professionals Council (HCPC), The British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT) and a member of BACP (MBACP). She works with clients with a wide range of needs and adapts her approach to meet the individual’s needs. She has a trauma informed approach to her work and is experienced with working with vulnerable adults with complex needs, such as childhood trauma and abuse, attachment difficulties, neurodiversity, stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and relationship difficulties. Her approaches and training include working creatively, a sensorimotor body mapping approach and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). Her everyday role includes supporting clients individually as well as delivering a long-term art psychotherapy group.

Services offered: Counselling and We llbeing through learning

Holisoa Andriambolanoro

Holisoa Andriambolanoro, also known as Mbola, is a qualified person-centred therapist and BACP-accredited practitioner. She has extensive experience working with vulnerable adults with complex needs, including attachment difficulties, domestic abuse, and histories of sexual trauma. She also supports clients experiencing anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and relationship challenges.

In addition to English, Mbola is fluent in French and Malagasy, her native language.

Mbola works collaboratively with her clients, creating a supportive, compassionate, and non-judgmental space where they can safely explore the issues affecting them. Drawing on her therapeutic training and professional background in the NHS and voluntary sector, as well as her previous career as a professional dancer, she integrates body awareness, mindfulness, and creativity into her practice to support clients in moving forward on their personal journeys.

Abi Rowan

Abi is a Psychotherapist/Counsellor working in the Perinatal team. She works with pregnant women and women with babies up to a year old, supporting them to explore what is meaningful to them, to search new ways of relating to themselves and others, and develop a greater sense of inner safety, as they go through the life changing experiences of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood. She has worked for various third sector organisations in Leeds and has spent much of her working life working with children, young people and families often with creative play based therapy. She is a member of the BACP.