Cultural Wellbeing Architect & Educator
Building culturally Sensitive, anti-racist learning ecosystems in childcare & care settings
Akwaaba ǀ Ni Matavinaka mai ǀ Welkom ǀ Bem-vindo ǀ Bienvenue ǀ Karibu ǀ أهلًا وسهلً ǀ સ્વાગત છે ǀ خوش آمدی
I help childcare and care teams build emotional safety, racial literacy, and attuned daily practice—so belonging becomes something children, parents, and staff experience every day, not something written on a poster.
Prefer Dutch? Lees dit in het Nederlands
Who I am
I’m Hyacinth Jones-Maes — a Cultural Wellbeing Architect & Educator. I design learning experiences where people can practise belonging as a daily habit—especially in settings where race, migration, and power quietly shape “normal” routines.
Specifically, in Flanders, you can also think of my role as a pedagogical coach (pedagogisch coach) for childcare and care teams.
Why this work
After stepping out of corporate work nearly two decades ago and switching to holistic coaching, my current work exists to examine small moments that shape a child’s nervous system and sense of self: who is soothed, who is corrected, who is believed, who is seen.
My work then seeks to make those small moments more attuned, more dignifying, and more truthful—for children, families, and staff.
How I work
The aim is simple and brave: belonging as a habit, and a powerfully peaceful present we can actually feel.
-
Healing-centred: we work with the emotional and bodily impact of harm, not only ideas
Anti-racist & decolonial: focused on impact, patterns, and repair (not guilt or perfection)
Practice-based: real cases, simple language, doable changes
Protective: no tokenising, no forced disclosure, no “debate club” dynamics
Light when possible: because play, warmth, and creativity help learning land
-
I’m Belgium-based, shaped by multi-cultural roots and two decades of living and working in Flemish communities. I’ve worked across care and education, and I bring additional facilitation experience from earlier corporate roles in Brussels and London.
I participated in the Racism Unravelled (Racisme Ontrafeld) research with Sankaa vzw, translating findings into practical learning for care and education settings.I also participated in the social experiment by Avansa Oost-Brabant (Leuven/Louvain), De Conversaties.
-
You can expect a warm container, clear agreements, and tools that show up in real life: meetings, parent conversations, staff onboarding, and daily care routines.
-
I’m currently focused on supporting Flemish childcare and care teams, while building work that can adapt internationally. The method stays consistent; the historical and cultural context adapts.
my Strengths
Every school, university, organisation 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.
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:
“A child feels safe when adults choose repair over defensiveness.
If we, adults, manage to reconcile with what has been left out of our education, it becomes what it was always meant to be — a pathway home.”