Teaching, Training & Facilitation
Learning spaces rooted in relationship, reflection and real change
Meaningful learning requires more than the delivery of information.
People need space to question, practise, reflect, encounter different perspectives and consider what new understanding asks of them in real life.
I offer teaching, training and facilitated learning for counselling courses, charities, community organisations, cultural institutions, wellbeing services and other teams seeking thoughtful, relational and socially conscious development.
My principal areas of work include:
- Counselling education and practitioner development.
- Racial trauma and culturally responsive practice.
- Anti-racist, decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches.
- Trauma-informed care and relational practice.
- Reflective practice and staff wellbeing.
- Burnout, boundaries and sustainable community work.
- Identity, belonging and collective care.
- Facilitated conversations, circles and community programmes.
I work in Liverpool, across the North West and elsewhere in the UK, with online delivery also available where appropriate.
Whether I am teaching trainee counsellors, facilitating a staff group or delivering a racial-trauma workshop, my aim is to create a space in which people can think deeply, participate honestly and leave with something that changes how they understand or practise their work.
How I approach learning
People learn best when they feel safe enough to be honest and challenged enough to grow.
Safety does not mean avoiding every difficult question. Meaningful learning may require us to examine assumptions, acknowledge gaps in our understanding and remain present when something unsettles the way we see ourselves.
But shame, humiliation and fear rarely produce deep or lasting development.
My approach is warm, experiential and participative. I bring structure and clear learning aims while allowing enough space for what emerges within the group.
Depending upon the setting, this may include:
- Accessible taught input.
- Reflective discussion.
- Skills practice and experiential exercises.
- Case studies and real-life scenarios.
- Small-group exploration.
- Embodied awareness and attention to emotional responses.
- Creative or contemplative activities.
- Opportunities to connect theory with lived experience.
- Personal reflection and practical action planning.
I do not want participants simply to remember what was presented. I want them to consider:
What does this mean for how I understand people? What does it ask of me? What might I now do differently?
Information can be delivered. Learning has to be encountered.
Counselling education and practitioner development
I am a counselling lecturer at Blackburne House in Liverpool, where I teach and develop learning from foundational counselling skills through to diploma-level practitioner training. I have also taught counselling within further education at Wirral Metropolitan College.
My teaching is grounded in humanistic, person-centred, relational and experiential values, while drawing upon trauma-informed, embodied, existential and decolonial perspectives.
Counsellor education involves far more than learning a collection of techniques.
A practitioner may understand every theoretical term and still struggle to remain emotionally present with another person. They may know what empathy means while finding it difficult to meet experiences that challenge their values, activate their defences or leave them feeling powerless.
Training therefore needs to support the development of the whole practitioner.
My counselling teaching may explore:
- Person-centred, humanistic and relational theory.
- Counselling skills and the therapeutic relationship.
- Empathy, authenticity and unconditional positive regard.
- Experiential and focusing-oriented practice.
- Trauma and nervous-system awareness.
- Attachment, loss and relational patterns.
- Ethics, boundaries and professional responsibility.
- Power within the therapeutic relationship.
- Race, culture, identity and anti-oppressive practice.
- Neurodiversity and inclusive ways of learning and working.
- Personal development and reflective practice.
- Use of self and the practitioner’s emotional responses.
- Integrating theory without losing contact with the person.
- Preparing for placement and developing fitness to practise.
I aim to make theory intellectually substantial but also alive and usable. Learners are encouraged to understand where ideas came from, consider their strengths and limitations and explore how they affect what happens between two human beings in a room.
Training a counsellor is not simply teaching techniques. It is helping somebody develop the presence, integrity and courage to remain in relationship.
Alongside direct teaching, I can offer guest sessions, specialist workshops and CPD, course contributions, curriculum consultation and the development of learning resources for counselling and wellbeing programmes.
Racial trauma and culturally responsive practice
Racism is not simply an attitude held by an individual. It can shape bodies, nervous systems, relationships, identities, organisations and whole communities.
Training in this area must therefore go beyond definitions, statistics and general statements about equality.
My racial-trauma and culturally responsive practice training helps participants explore the emotional, relational, embodied and systemic effects of racism—and what these realities require from therapists, educators, managers, health professionals and organisations.
Depending upon the group and its purpose, we may examine:
- The psychological and embodied effects of racism.
- Racial trauma, cumulative stress and hypervigilance.
- Microaggressions, stereotyping and racialised threat.
- Racial gaslighting and the erosion of trust in one’s perceptions.
- Code-switching, perfectionism and over-functioning as survival strategies.
- Racialised shame, colourism and internalised racism.
- Mixed heritage, cultural identity and belonging.
- Race, power and difference within helping relationships.
- The impact of predominantly white institutions.
- White defensiveness, silence and fear of making mistakes.
- The limits of cultural competence as a checklist.
- Anti-racist and decolonial approaches to therapeutic practice.
- Creating environments in which people of colour do not have to continually translate or defend their experience.
- Moving from organisational statements towards accountable practice.
I do not approach this work as an abstract intellectual exercise. It is connected to my experience as a mixed-heritage African-Caribbean and Irish man, a therapist specialising in racial trauma, an educator and a community facilitator.
At the same time, I do not assume that my experience represents that of every Black or mixed-heritage person. Participants are invited to engage complexity rather than replacing one set of generalisations with another.
This work can involve discomfort, but discomfort is not the same as harm. I aim to create conditions in which people can recognise defensiveness, uncertainty and mistakes without becoming trapped in shame or asking those affected by racism to take care of everybody else.
Anti-racist practice begins when knowledge becomes responsibility.
Reflective practice and staff wellbeing
People working in therapy, education, health, cultural institutions, equality work and community activism are often exposed to considerable emotional demand.
They may support people through trauma, racism, grief, poverty, discrimination and crisis while also navigating limited resources, organisational pressures and expectations that they will continue giving indefinitely.
Those with personal or community connections to the issues involved may carry an additional burden.
Reflective practice creates space to pause and consider not only what people are doing, but what the work is doing to them.
A facilitated reflective space may help participants:
- Process the emotional impact of their work.
- Recognise signs of burnout, overwhelm or vicarious trauma.
- Understand relational and organisational dynamics.
- Explore ethical tensions and difficult decisions.
- Notice patterns of over-responsibility or self-neglect.
- Reflect upon race, power, identity and belonging within the workplace.
- Strengthen boundaries without losing compassion.
- Learn from one another without being expected to solve everything.
- Reconnect with the meaning and values that brought them to the work.
- Identify what support or organisational change may be needed.
My facilitation is relational, trauma-informed and attentive to the dynamics of the group. I aim to help people speak honestly without allowing the space to become unsafe, blaming or dominated by those with the greatest organisational power.
A reflective group is not group therapy, supervision, a formal grievance process or a substitute for responsible management. I establish clear boundaries around the purpose and confidentiality of the space so that participants understand what it can and cannot provide.
When facilitated with care, reflective practice can help people feel less isolated, respond more thoughtfully and remain connected to their humanity within demanding work.
Care for the work must include care for the people carrying it.
Facilitation that makes room for the whole person
Facilitation is not simply keeping a discussion on time or making sure everybody has spoken.
A group has a life of its own. There may be anxiety, silence, conflict, hope, difference, mistrust, grief and knowledge that has not yet found words.
My task as a facilitator is to provide enough structure for the group to feel held while remaining responsive to what is actually happening.
I try to create spaces where participants can:
- Arrive as human beings rather than only as professional roles.
- Speak without needing to perform certainty.
- Listen across differences without erasing them.
- Recognise what is happening emotionally as well as intellectually.
- Question dominant assumptions and make room for marginalised knowledge.
- Experience challenge without humiliation.
- Remain connected during complexity or disagreement.
- Identify shared values and realistic next steps.
- Recover creativity, relationship and hope.
Where appropriate to the setting, I may incorporate grounding, mindfulness, reflective writing, movement, music, imagery, ritual or circle practice. These elements are never introduced merely for atmosphere. They are used intentionally and with consideration for consent, accessibility, culture and the purpose of the gathering.
Community, healing and Ubuntu
Some forms of healing can only happen in community.
I am the founder of Ubuntu, a Liverpool-based grassroots collective for Black, Brown, mixed-heritage and other people of colour. Ubuntu creates spaces centred upon healing, connection, culture, spirituality, community care and collective liberation.
Through Ubuntu, I have facilitated healing circles, retreats, community wellbeing days, reflective gatherings, ceremonies and conversations about identity, race, belonging and the emotional realities of community work.
Ubuntu is rooted in the African humanist principle:
I am because we are.
This reminds us that wellbeing is not purely an individual achievement. We are shaped, wounded, sustained and restored through our relationships with one another.
Ubuntu spaces may include meditation, drumming, libation, gentle movement, reflection, shared food, cultural practice and honest conversation. The intention is not to prescribe one form of spirituality or one way of being a person of colour. It is to create room for connection, rest, joy, grief, ancestry and collective care.
My community work continually informs my teaching and professional facilitation. It reminds me that knowledge does not belong only to institutions and that people carry wisdom through culture, lived experience, relationship, creativity and survival.
Organisations can learn a great deal from the ways communities have cared for one another when formal systems were absent, inaccessible or unsafe.
Experience grounded in real settings
My approach has developed through work across counselling education, private practice, community organising, cultural institutions and staff wellbeing.
This has included:
- Teaching and developing counselling education at Blackburne House.
- Previous counselling teaching within further education at Wirral Metropolitan College.
- Facilitating reflective and supportive spaces for staff of colour at National Museums Liverpool, including people working with the emotionally demanding histories held by the International Slavery Museum.
- Co-facilitating workshops and training on racial trauma with wellbeing consultant and coach Saeed Olayiwola.
- Co-delivering the Radical Resilience programme for leaders, health workers, equality and inclusion practitioners, changemakers and community activists of colour.
- Providing staff wellbeing support connected with the Anthony Walker Foundation.
- Contributing to community wellbeing and culturally rooted work alongside organisations and groups including Katumba.
- Founding and facilitating Ubuntu healing circles, retreats and community programmes.
- Working therapeutically with people affected by racism, trauma, burnout, identity struggles and experiences of exclusion.
- Speaking and contributing to events concerning racial justice, community healing, spirituality, culture and collective wellbeing.
Each setting has taught me something different about what allows people to feel recognised, what prevents honest dialogue and what becomes possible when learning is rooted in genuine relationship.
I bring professional experience and clear theoretical foundations, but I do not arrive believing that all knowledge sits with the facilitator. Participants and communities carry essential knowledge about their own work, lives and contexts.
The strongest learning often develops when these different forms of knowledge can meet.
Areas I can explore with your organisation
Training, teaching or facilitated work can be designed around themes including:
- Racial trauma and its embodied effects.
- Culturally responsive and anti-racist therapeutic practice.
- Mixed heritage, identity and belonging.
- Trauma-informed relationships and services.
- Working relationally with distress.
- Empathy, boundaries and the use of self.
- Burnout, resilience and sustainable care.
- Reflective practice for emotionally demanding work.
- Staff wellbeing and collective care.
- Creating safer spaces for staff of colour.
- Power, difference and organisational culture.
- Decolonising counselling and wellbeing practice.
- Spirituality, culture and meaning within therapeutic work.
- Community healing and culturally rooted approaches to wellbeing.
- Working with anger, shame, grief and protective responses.
- Neurodiversity and inclusive teaching or therapeutic practice.
- Personal development for counselling practitioners.
- Building relationships across difference without avoiding complexity.
This list is not exhaustive. I am happy to discuss an organisation’s particular context and consider whether I am the right person to support the work.
Possible formats
Depending upon your aims, I can offer:
- One-off workshops.
- Half-day or full-day training.
- Multi-session learning programmes.
- Guest teaching and specialist course contributions.
- Reflective practice groups.
- Staff circles and facilitated listening spaces.
- Team wellbeing sessions.
- Community healing and wellbeing days.
- Retreats and longer experiential gatherings.
- Talks, panels and conference contributions.
- Consultation on counselling curricula or learning resources.
- Collaborative programme design.
Work can be delivered in person or online, although some relational and experiential formats are particularly valuable when people can share physical space.
I can work with an established brief or collaborate with you to shape something more specific to your participants, organisation and aims.
Thoughtful work begins before the session
Effective training or facilitation begins with understanding the context.
Before agreeing to a piece of work, I will usually want to know:
- Who will be participating?
- What has led the organisation to seek this work now?
- What do participants already understand?
- Is attendance voluntary or required?
- What power differences exist within the group?
- Have any recent events affected trust or safety?
- What does the organisation hope will change?
- What support will be available if difficult material emerges?
- How will learning be supported after the session?
- What access, cultural or wellbeing needs should be considered?
This matters particularly when working with racial trauma, staff distress or organisational conflict. A workshop cannot repair a harmful culture if the wider organisation is unwilling to listen, take responsibility or change its practice.
I will be honest about what can realistically be achieved within the time available and what may require deeper or longer-term work.
Fees are agreed according to the format, preparation, group size, travel and overall scope of the commission.
Beginning a conversation
If you are considering teaching, training or facilitated work, you are welcome to get in touch.
You do not need to arrive with a completed brief. Tell me a little about your organisation or group, what has brought you to this point, who the work would be for and what you hope it might make possible.
We can then arrange an initial conversation, consider the most appropriate format and decide whether my approach is a good fit for your needs.
I welcome enquiries from colleges, counselling and wellbeing services, museums and cultural institutions, charities, public services, community organisations and groups committed to thoughtful, ethical and socially responsive practice.
Learning becomes transformative when it changes not only what we know, but how we meet one another.