About

At the heart of my work is a philosophy that learning should be human-centred, intersectional and practically actionable.

What sets me apart from standardised corporate training packages is a blend of institutional expertise and lived experience.

By bringing personal perspectives on disability and LGBTQ+ identity directly into the design process, I deliver training that is empathic, grounded and resonant for participants.

Experience and achievements

I have 30 years’ experience in service delivery and training. My career began in mental health, managing a crisis line and supporting people affected by suicide through advocacy work; experience that has shaped everything I’ve done since.

In 2006 I co-founded Grassroots Suicide Prevention and spent a decade as a director, leading the development of Stay Alive, the UK’s first suicide prevention app, now downloaded over 950,000 times across 208 countries. In recognition of this work I was made a Fellow of the University of Sussex. Leaving Grassroots in 2016, I moved into LGBTQ+ health inclusion work, including supporting a psychiatric inpatient unit to achieve a gold-standard LGBTQ+ inclusion award.

For four years I then worked as EDI Officer at Brighton & Hove City Council’s Learning, Inclusion and Organisational Development service, leading the design and delivery of organisation-wide EDI training and toolkits, and co-developing an inclusive leadership programme delivered to over 100 managers.

Over three decades in the sector I’ve partnered with organisations including Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Network Rail, Southern Water, Brighton Chamber of Commerce, Lloyds Banking Group, YMCA Brighton, BHT Sussex, Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, National Numeracy, Sustainable Food Places and Olly’s Future.

Lived experience

My understanding of inclusion isn’t only professional; it’s deeply personal. Working in mental health and suicide prevention gave me the tools to face my own mental health challenges and to support others through crisis and ongoing struggle. Moving into LGBTQ+ inclusion work at a specialist charity confronted me with the internalised homophobia I’d carried since childhood: growing up within a faith tradition that framed my sexuality as sinful, against a backdrop of medical history that had pathologised it. That role also deepened my understanding of trans, non-binary and intersex experience, and helped me unlearn the transphobia I had been culturally trained in. Alongside this, I’ve worked consistently on my own White allyship, unlearning and actively addressing racism rather than treating it as someone else’s work to do. Later, in a disability-focused role in local government, I began the longer process of coming to terms with my own disability. I’ve lived with fibromyalgia for fifteen years, and it took this role for me to finally claim “disabled” as an identity I could be proud of, rather than one to hide.

These experiences shape how I show up in a room. I bring a fearlessness to naming the most difficult parts of human experience directly, rather than talking around them, because I know what it costs to leave them unspoken. My empathy for marginalised communities isn’t abstract; it’s built from living at these intersections myself. And because I know what it feels like to be in spaces that weren’t built with people like me in mind, psychological safety and trauma-informed practice aren’t add-ons to my facilitation, they’re at its centre: creating the conditions for people to feel safe in a room in a way they may never have experienced elsewhere.