cultural wellbeing Architect & Educator
Akwaaba ǀ Ni Matavinaka mai ǀ Welkom ǀ Bem-vindo ǀ Bienvenue ǀ Karibu ǀ أهلًا وسهلً ǀ સ્વાગત છે ǀ خوش آمدی
Harmonising leadership, education and wellbeing in our schools and universities.
Hello,
You’ve arrived at a space where learning and leadership breathe differently. Here, education remembers its pulse — moving with the rhythms of care, belonging, and collective renewal.
I work with schools, universities and communities in Belgium to face stigma, unconscious bias and colonial legacies with more steadiness, care and clarity.
Through decolonisation-based education, embodied practice and dialogue, I help teams turn uncomfortable truths into everyday ways of relating, teaching and leading.
How I hold this work
This work touches living histories, nervous systems and family stories. It asks a lot of the people who step into it. Because of that, I pay attention not only to what we talk about, but to how we move through it together.
🌀 Healing-centred
I work with the emotional and bodily impact of racism, colonial legacies and stigma, not just the policies and theories around them. We move at a human pace, with room for discomfort, tenderness and rest.
🧘♀️ Embodied & practical
We use story, theatre, mindfulness, dialogue and simple body-based practices. At the same time, everything comes back to daily life: what this means for your classroom, your meetings, your emails, your next difficult conversation.
🌱 Community-rooted, research-informed
My practice is shaped by two decades of living and working in Belgian communities, alongside collaborations with organisations, researchers and students. I draw on research, but I don’t hide behind it.
🕯️ Honest, not performative
I don’t offer quick fixes or glossy diversity statements. If you want to tick a box, I’m not your person. If you want people to feel seen, steadier and better equipped, we can do meaningful work together.
Roots & routes
Born in England to parents of African and Caribbean heritage, I’ve spent the last twenty years in Flanders raising a Belgian family of my own.
That “multi culture” life – British, African-Caribbean roots, plus Belgian daily reality – means I live many of the negotiations we ask children and young people to make: switching languages, navigating stereotypes, feeling both at home and out of place.
My own path has run through youth work, parenthood, community-building and collaborations with schools, universities and organisations. Again and again I see the same questions: Who is seen as believable? Who is asked to carry the weight? Whose history is told?
Cultural Wellbeing, for me, is about tending to all of this: the stories, the silences and the systems. It is about creating spaces where we can name what is happening, feel what it costs, and choose more ethical, life-giving ways of learning and leading together.
Threads Running Through My Work
Every school, university or community I work with has its own story. But the same threads keep appearing. These four strands are woven through everything I offer:
🌾 Emotional wellbeing & leadership for children and young people
Creating spaces where children and young people can name their feelings, trust their perceptions and practise leadership in age-appropriate ways. This can look like theatre-based camps, classroom sessions, or quiet one-to-one moments where a young person experiences themselves as capable and worthy of care.
🤝 Racial healing & education
Supporting staff, students, families and communities to recognise how racism, stigma and unconscious bias are shaping everyday life — and to respond without collapsing, attacking or turning away. We work with real scenarios, body responses and language, so people have something practical to reach for when harm or tension shows up.
🌕 Truth, reconciliation & cyclical wisdom
Honouring the wider cycles that shape our lives: seasons, bodies, grief, repair, attention and rest. This thread explores how colonial histories and current inequalities sit inside those cycles, and how education can become more truthful, humane and spacious without losing structure or rigour.
💎 Diamond clarity & resilience
Standing firm in the midst of resistance, avoidance and “this is how we’ve always done it.” This thread is about supporting educators, leaders, caregivers and young people to stay clear about what they’re seeing and what matters to them, while protecting their own nervous systems and capacity to care over time.
Cultural Wellbeing Pathways
Choose the pathway that feels closest to where you are right now. All pathways can be tailored for schools, universities and community spaces.
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Academy: Cultivating Embodied Learning
Learning spaces for staff, students and caregivers.
Explore decolonisation, stigma, unconscious bias and emotional leadership in a structured, supported way
Short courses, live cohorts and practice incorporating:
Emotional Wellbeing for Teachers and Parents
Social and Emotional Learning for Young People
Decolonising The Classroom Curriculum
Professional Development for Educators and Care Professionals
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Transforming Systems Through Awareness
Tailored support for schools, universities and organisations. “From Stigma to Steady Classrooms” journeys to staff development, curriculum and policy reviews, and research partnerships grounded in your real context:
Racial awareness training for staff & leadership
Safe, facilitated dialogues on race & belonging
Leadership clinics: repair practices & decision-making
Policy/curriculum advisory for HEIs & care sector
Keynotes, panels, and moderations (EU)
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Spaces for youth, parents and wider communities. Community circles, youth programmes and parent gatherings that weave theatre, story, mindfulness and dialogue into everyday life, centring belonging and cultural wellbeing:
Healing from the Stigma of Race & Privilege: monthly circle of community practice
Dialogue & storytelling for repair
Family constellations for belonging
Current work & collaborations
This work is already happening in many small, steady ways across Belgium. A few of the collaborations that shape my practice:
⚓ Sankaa Vzw – Racism Unravelled & Safe Harbour
Facilitating spaces where people of African descent and allies can name and unpack experiences of racism, stigma and institutional harm, and explore what healing and repair might look like in daily life.
🤝 Diversity & Belonging in higher education
Co-designing and facilitating trainings for third- and fourth-year BA students in the care sector (hogescholen / universities), translating research on racism and colonial legacies into embodied, practical tools for future professionals.
🧸 Belonging in Early Years (kinderopvang)
Researching how belonging, emotional wellbeing and leadership opportunities are (or are not) nurtured for young children of African descent in day-care settings across Flanders, with a focus on the everyday practices of care.
🗣️ Community dialogues on colonial history
Contributing to initiatives such as Avansa Oost-Brabant’s “De Conversaties” in Leuven – moderated, multi-voiced spaces where people explore Belgium’s colonial past and its living traces using trauma-informed methods and deep listening.
🎭 Youth programmes & creative camps
Designing week-long summer camps and shorter programmes where young people work with theatre and the four elements — air, water, fire, earth — to build emotional intelligence, social awareness and life skills in a light, supportive setting.
These collaborations keep the work grounded: in bodies, in local realities, in communities who are already thinking and feeling deeply about these questions.
Let’s talk about your context
If you recognise some of these patterns in your school, university or community, we can begin with a conversation.
No big performance, no instant solutions – just time to name what is present, ask questions and sense whether we are a good fit to work together.
You might be:
a school leader or care coordinator who feels the limits of “business as usual”
a lecturer or researcher wanting to bring decolonial practice into your teaching or projects
a community organiser, youth worker or parent looking for steadier ways to hold these conversations
a non-native student looking for sanctuary or a listening circle - a soft place to land and air frustrations and gain strength
If you’d like to explore what support could look like in your context, you can:
close to my heart
Truth & Reconciliation in Education
Every story begins somewhere — yet so many of our educational stories begin with an absence.
For generations, the knowledge, philosophies, and lived experiences of African peoples — and the deep wisdom of women’s bodies — have been silenced, simplified, or distorted within mainstream education.
This omission has shaped not only what we learn, but how we see ourselves, our communities, and our capacity to belong.Truth & Reconciliation in Education is my ongoing campaign to make these absences visible and to create space for repair.
Through research, dialogue, and embodied practice, this initiative restores voices, perspectives, and rhythms long missing from classrooms, training programmes and leadership spaces.
It asks us not only to add content, but to shift consciousness — from extraction to relationship, from competition to reciprocity, from hierarchy to harmony.Within this work, I collaborate with educators, parents, and community leaders to:
Design inclusive learning environments informed by multiple world views.
Develop curricula that honour cultural and gendered understandings of the human experience.
Offer reflection spaces that bring awareness to bias, empathy, and embodied accountability.
Co-create learning cycles aligned with natural and lunar rhythms, reconnecting education to the living systems it serves.
“Truth & Reconciliation in Education is not a programme — it is a movement toward integrity and wholeness in how we learn, teach, and lead.
When we reconcile with what has been left out, education becomes what it was always meant to be — a pathway home.”
GLOSSARY - Fante language words used on this website:
Adekyere = Academy
Amansan = Community
Nua = Sibling