With over 24 years of professional vocational experience and training as an accomplished environmental consultant specialising in risk management and assessment, alongside 17 years of business creation, leadership, innovation and development, I feel I have a unique set of skills to guide the Mindfulness Network through what’s described as the poly-crisis in our contemporary world and systems of society.
I’m also a mindfulness teacher, supervisor, and co-founder of the Urban Mindfulness Foundation. After completing my master’s in mindfulness studies, I co-created the award-winning Mindfulness-Based Inclusion Training program, specifically designed to build solidarity through practice, and dismantle racism and social inequalities, collectively.
I co-authored the collaborative paper “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Our Time: A Curriculum That Is Up to the Task” and serve as a trustee for the British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches (BAMBA), the UK’s primary professional body for registered practitioners, teachers, teacher training organisations, and innovators.
Starting my mindfulness journey in 2009, I’m at the forefront of socially engaged mindfulness training, especially for underrepresented groups in the UK. I play an active role in developing and leading BAMBA’s new EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) task force, advocating for co-created, collaborative training that values lived experience. I also support my local council’s Race Equality Alliance and Sussex Mindfulness Centre’s EDI developments and IAPT training. By facilitating grassroots engagement, my work has aided access and relatability in our current times of collective global challenge.
I bring a broad, experiential, and socially conscious perspective that I believe will be especially valuable in this privileged role. With a clear intention to reduce personal, collective, social, and planetary suffering by utilising the practice of mindfulness, it also feels important to emphasise that while I plan to fulfil the duties within my designated role of Executive Director, I will be guided by the principle of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu reminds me that ‘I am because we are’ and encourages me to acknowledge that our collective existence and co-creation are crucial aspects of the human experience and perhaps the key to personal, collective, and organisational flourishing. Likewise, may I take this opportunity to share a personal but important cultural proverb that asserts, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. If the Mindfulness Network is the ‘child,’ I have faith in this team to be the village that helps to raise the Mindfulness Network to its full potential.