Design issue in swing application

Hello, in my program I toggle between two panels depending on which
phase the program is currently in. I wrote a class that functions as the
entry point of the program and it's composed of a JFrame along with the
components of that frame. Now I wanted to break out my two panels to
make the code more readable so I created two new classes that extend
from JPanel and here's where my design issue arose. Consider the code
below (people who have been following my other thread will recognise it
;-)) which is for the "welcome panel" that is shown when the program is
launched:

package gui;

import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.GridBagConstraints;
import java.awt.GridBagLayout;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;

import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.border.TitledBorder;

public class WelcomePanel extends JPanel {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1596841645688614873L;

    public WelcomePanel(final CenteredGroup inst) {
       this.inst = inst;

       setPreferredSize(new Dimension(480, 100));
       setBorder(new TitledBorder("Start a new session by opening a
BioModel or load a previously saved session"));
       setLayout(new GridBagLayout());

       initButtons();
    }

    private void initButtons() {
       final CenteredGroup inst2 = this.inst;
       b1 = new JButton("Open BioModel");

       b1.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
             @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                inst2.eventOpenBioModel();
             }});

       b2 = new JButton("Load Saved Session");

       b2.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
             @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                inst2.eventLoadSavedSession();
             }});

       addButtonsToGroupPanel(b1, b2);
    }

    private void addButtonsToGroupPanel(JButton b1, JButton b2) {
       GridBagConstraints gbc = new GridBagConstraints();

       gbc.gridx = 0;
       gbc.gridy = 0;
       gbc.gridwidth = 1;
       gbc.gridheight = 1;
       gbc.weightx = 0.5;
       gbc.weighty = 0;
       gbc.anchor = GridBagConstraints.CENTER;
       gbc.fill = GridBagConstraints.NONE;

       add(b1, gbc);

       gbc.gridx = 1;

       add(b2, gbc);
    }

    private CenteredGroup inst = null;

    private JButton b1 = null;
    private JButton b2 = null;
}

What I don't like here are the event handlers for the buttons and, more
specifically, I don't like these two things:
1. The class WelcomePanel knows about its "parent", CenteredGroup (I
will change that name btw).
2. I had to change the event*-methods in CenteredGroup from being
private to default access level so I could call them.

Am I right to worry about these design issues and, if so, how should I
solve them? Maybe I shouldn't have created this class in the first place
but I thought the code for CenteredGroup was becoming a bit long.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any help.

- F