I come from a community development background, having worked in grass roots community projects in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia for many years. The past 5 or so years, I felt drawn to bringing people, ideas, concepts, knowledge, experiences and learnings together, creating a space for collaboration. I really used my instincts to create this and was often frustrated by how people say they want this but retreat back to their singular objective in isolation in every day life. My experience in these collaborative gatherings have inspired me to continue in this vein, the energy, trust, connection and deep affection we all experienced was transformational for me and through this course and experience, I want to gain further tools and experience to bring this to all aspects to my life.
I have filled many rolls in my life, but feel as though I have not explored and lived out my true purpose in life and am starting to work in areas with people where I truly believe my passion and skills lie and feel that the timing of this course is serendipitous as I start exploring my role in this sphere.

My role is to lead myself life with the confidence of knowing who I am meant to be, trusting my deep purpose in life and allowing life to unfold as I learn and grow.
I am a leader in the role I play with the new line of work I am in, trusting in the divine wisdom I have within me and what I have learnt through being connected with the world and myself. While trusting in my own knowledge and wisdom, I am approaching this from a beginners mind, learning from those around me and trusting that those around me will share in the openness of learning and growing together and will also show up willing to live their true purpose.
My role is to shine my full light and to inspire those around me to do the same. The above applies to both my work and to my role as a single mother to my three children.

My overall goal is to live my purpose without doubting myself, not allowing that doubt to make me feel small and make myself invisible or take on roles to please or appease others, which deprives energy from my true purpose. I have just started working with a group of 18 women who are in an addiction treatment facility, they are there for 6 months in theory but many of them stay for up to a year. They come from and live in impoverished communities where crime, addiction and survival are the norms. I have longed to share my love of nature and the mountains with people and it has taken me a few years to really open myself up to this opportunity. I myself am in recovery and being in nature has given me immense gifts of connection to myself, to the planet, nature, the universe and people, it has slowly built my trust and confidence in myself and while I want to continue to grow in my recovery by sharing it, my goal is to create experiences for these women to reconnect with the wholeness of themselves, the strength within them and that they in turn can be their own light in their lives and can also radiate that to all around them. It is my goal to bring the the connection, energy and love I experienced in collaborative work in the past is something to my work and my family.

My current and future growth is to really learn to listen to myself and trust my deep instincts and wisdom and to be open to growth and learning. I have come to realise that my standard for myself in every aspect of my life has been perfection and that this has closed me to growth, learning and trusting in myself and I had become somewhat paralysed in most areas of my life. I feel very challenged by this course, not having a current professional title or body of work to stand on and I have been tempted to bow out of this course over the past 2 months, however I do know and trust the wisdom within me and my challenge and opportunity is to really show up as my whole self, celebrating who I am and those around me, willing to listen and grow and to blossom as a person.

While instinctively the regenerative concepts feel very familiar to me, my area of growth is to learn and practice the regenerative concepts in this course, to apply them in the group and in my work and to reflect and build these into skills I use in my work. I am also looking to grow in a community and to build a network where I can both try these concepts and receive feedback as I put them into practice.

I have many years of working alongside local communities, listening to, learning from and collaborating with other individuals and organisations. I often went against the expected norm of development work, instinctively seeking collaborations, working from a concept of being connected and whole entities, as people, as communities and ecosystems and often alienated colleagues and donors in this process. While my idealism often let me feel like an island, these frustrations have led me to this community now and so my dreams, ideas and efforts of collaboration have been a large investment to bring me here today and not a waste of my time.

My main influences have been Rudolf Steiner as a child growing up in a Waldorf household, permaculture practitioners I have met in my work and the bio-dynamic concepts I grew up with.

I believe we are all divine beings, connected by spirit in this moment which is part of everything that has come before and is yet to come and we are all on a journey of wholeness back to our selves. We are here to accompany each other on this journey home to ourselves.