Trainers

Carrie is a coach and facilitator, and the Head of Movement Coaching at neon, where they lead on coaching and organisational development and support for movement organisations. Originally from Scotland, Carrie holds over a decade of experience working with charities, non-profits and in movement spaces on all things systems change, culture building and strategy, rooted in practices of collective care and liberation. When not at work, she can generally be found on a bicycle or steadily killing all of her houseplants.

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Katie is currently Head of Campaigns at RECLAIM in Manchester and has been a trainer on NEON’s Movement Builders programme for the past three years. She’s spent the past two decades focused on creating change in post-16 education, working across policy, campaigning, training and organising in different spaces including students unions, trade unions, communities, charities and NGO’s.
She’s passionate about how radical change in our education system can build solidarity, and is currently doing a part time PhD exploring anarchism and further education. If she was ever on Mastermind her specialist subject would be Antartica.

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Laura Barker is a writer, facilitator, and no-dig enthusiast who lives in Lewisham, SE London. She’s a Taurus in 3 houses and an Aries rising. She runs a queer black writing group in London and she plants community orchards. Laura’s worked as part of Black Lives Matter LDN, KIN Collective, Spread the Word, London Wildlife Trust, and Plantain Federation, and now works at Revoke and Mind, and she is part of an allotment collective in Forest Hill. Laura supports the return of the original Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and her favourite crisps are Walkers Ready Salted.

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Tom has over 10 years of experience in social justice work and is the Creative Director of The Advocacy Academy. Their facilitation experience spans a variety of roles from working with Great Men to challenge gender stereotypes to developing community organising workshops with Battersea Arts Centre and leading on Diversity & Inclusion as an Associate Director of National Youth Theatre. They are actively involved in LGBTQ+ and Gender Equality activism. They write and talk about these issues in various settings, including as a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and a frequent panellist at WOW Festival.

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Kirrin is a queer, trans and neurodiverse person currently living in London with their assistance dog in-training Nettle. Kirrin has previously worked in LGBTQIA+ advocacy and trans rights organising, having worked with Galop, Gendered Intelligence, Stonewall, Bar Woteva, and GIRES. They are currently working on two projects. The first focuses on exploring and improving trans, intersex and gender diverse peoples experiences of end-of-life care and after-death services. The second is a group for trans people with dogs to access free dog training. He currently works as the Head of Facilitation at NEON where he designs and runs training programmes teaching people how to facilitate using anti-oppressive methods. In Kirrin & Nettle’s free time they compete in the sport of canine agility, and are learning how to be a human remains detection team to help reunite remains with the friends and family searching for them.

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Minda has worked with NEON for many years, initially as a board member and now as an associate, providing freelance coaching, facilitation and consultancy. With over 20 years’ work and organising experience, including leading the Liberation Department at the National Union of Students, Minda has significant dedication to supporting people and communities who experience marginalisation and underrepresentation to seek Solidarity, Justice and Liberation. Minda’s work centres on working with groups and organisations to consider culture, strategy, structure, priorities, the spaces we occupy and how we make them more like the world we want. For Minda, that world is one where everyone can flourish and be free, safe, well and happy. Born into social justice movements and activism, Minda is passionate about self-led movements, intersectional feminism, abolition, community organising and creating an education system that is accessible to everyone at any time. Minda loves music, singing, dancing, cycling, plants, good food and company and hanging out with her loved ones, especially her daughter, partner and little dog Nige.

Zahra is a queer Black feminist from Lewisham, South East London. After moving back to London in 2015 after living abroad for some years, she delved into the city's political landscape via Take Back The City an anti-gentrification and popular education political project which offered an intervention into local elections. Following that she co-founded a project called Our Fathers and Us which looked into Black British fatherhood and the myths and realities of black communities and their relationships to fatherhood.Since then her commitment to community-led radical political action has manifested through her involvement with the community food movement, climate justice work and land-based activism, especially where it is led by people of colour and working class people. Heeding Malcolm X’s wisdom that “Revolution is based on land [and] land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality”, she begun to work within a framework of understanding that encompasses Black liberation as global land struggle and a fight against white supremacist separation and disconnect from self, other and the land. She follows in the footsteps of her pan-African parents in believing that global solidarity for Africa and the diaspora can unlock the transformative potential humanity needs to heal from the traumas of white supremacist hetero-patriarchy. Dreaming of a thriving independent media sector and joyful black children make her happy.

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Betty is a Movement Leader at The Advocacy Academy, working on the development and delivery of the five day Spark programme educating young people from South London on social justice and campaigning. She is an alumni of the programme herself, completing the programme in 2017 as an angry seventeen-year-old. After doing the programme she was a part of the anti-school exclusion campaign Education Not Exclusion and went on to co-produce a documentary about it with the human rights organisation EachOther. She was also a member of the Involving Young People’s Collective at grant-making foundation Esmee Fairbairn and works with HUDL: Youth Development Agency supporting organisations to implement youth governance structures that are meaningful and nourishing for the young people involved. In her spare time Betty is an avid reader, cinema (Letterboxd) lover, pole practise-r, traveller and London wanderer.

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