A little bit about the person.…

I’m a mum of two grown sons, both now married so I magically have two daughters as well! I also now have wonderful grandchildren!

My latest passion is learning to be a grandmother.

I love learning and the freedom and opportunities to do so. I love watching, thinking, reading, imagining and interpreting. I love words, questions and stories, people and journeys. Although I travel often and widely, while travelling itself is not my favourite pursuit (a bit neurotic about what to pack!), I love arriving. I also appreciate being home again to find reflective space.

On the Mori “Now discover your Strengths” profile, I am described as a ‘strategic thinker’ and a ‘relator’ who pursues depth of relationship. I value difference, finding it very creative, ‘have an innate ability to understand where others are coming from’ and am ‘an activator’; I happily enthuse about and motivate others towards new possibilities.

And I love gardening, particularly mud, worms and composting.

I love shovelling last year’s food waste with this year’s steaming horse manure and seeing it make things grow. How ever does that work?

I am seriously OTT at pruning, cuttings and planting, grateful for the limits of a relatively small garden… and hopeless at weeding which I happily leave to my ‘detail’ partner.

I can’t see enough films. My favourite ever is probably “There will be blood”.

Visceral, extreme but asks the questions - Must life always be so?

I like ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ too as good old-fashioned, but quirky escapism.

A little bit about my experience…

I have been a teacher of modern languages, English and R.E. at different times, with a joint BA Hons in French and English and a PGCE.

I am a self employed consultant with an MSc in Positive Psychology and considerable experience in the following areas

• Helping to reform and deliver effective training modules, education programmes and alternative curricula in colleges, schools and voluntary organisations
• Strategising for effective delivery of relief and development programmes in UK and overseas, ensuring good governance, strategic planning and organisational development
• Designing and implementing system reviews in diverse contexts, including constructing and leading interview processes, with a broad range of stakeholders
• Working with boards and teams to help them to work with change and to imagine new possibilities for their organisations’ growth and reach
• Working with christian communities in the context of major social, cultural and faith-map change, particularly to reorientate them towards the needs of vulnerable people in their localities.

And I have been radically trained as the primary carer in a large extended family including, at various times

• Children with educational challenges, involving engagement with Educational Psychologists, Elective Home Education, alternative curricula
• Informal fostering of emotionally disturbed teenagers
• Elderly relatives with mobility problems
• Teenage Somali refugee with language and developmental challenges
• Cross cultural colleagues and/or students from different ethnicities.