People often ask how I went from working in substance misuse services and prisons to running an equality, diversity and inclusion consultancy. On paper, it’s an unlikely path. To me, it has always felt like the same work: understanding how people become who they are, and what role the systems around them play in that.
My own experience shaped that curiosity. I grew up in Jersey as a mixed-race woman, living in what I call “the grey space,” racially ambiguous, shaped by cultural proximity to Blackness but phenotype distance from it. Sometimes my mixedness is recognised instantly; at other times, when I name it myself, it’s met with disbelief. That taught me to become comfortable with complexity, and that identity rarely fits the categories we create for it. It’s why I use the term white-assumed rather than white-passing, and why I push organisations to think critically about the language they default to. I am also the first in my family to attend university. Education to me is about more than qualifications, it’s about learning how to ask better questions to help change systems in a more authentic way.
My career began in substance misuse services, working alongside people in active addiction and recovery. Addiction was never just about addiction. It was trauma, poverty, relationships, identity, hope, and the systems people had encountered long before they met me. That deepened when I became a substance misuse therapist inside a prison, where my job was to understand the person behind the behaviour, and that required curiosity before judgement, context before conclusion and relationships before solutions. Those principles still run through my consultancy today. I later worked nationally in programme management at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, bridging the worlds that are now central to my work: social wellness, EDI, and organisational systems. By 2020 I wanted to bring those worlds together, because too many organisations treat workplace wellbeing and EDI as separate conversations, when in people’s lives, they never are. Mindset Matters UK was built on the belief that identity shapes our sense of self, relationships shape our wellbeing, and organisations cannot support one without attending to the other.
I launched just before Covid, and then consultancy work all but stopped! So I made the uncomfortable decision to return to employment while building the business on evenings and weekends. This chapter of my life taught me that resilience isn’t about relentlessly pushing forward regardless, it’s recognising when something isn’t sustainable, and adapting without losing your purpose. I re-learnt that lesson when I began a PhD at Cambridge in 2024, researching EDI in education. Unfortunately, the same backlash against EDI that I was researching was making it harder to sustain my consultancy. Self-funding a part-time PhD while building a business, the financial reality became impossible to ignore. Leaving Cambridge was one of the hardest decisions I’ve made but I shared it publicly via LinkedIn, because too often we celebrate people for getting into elite institutions but don’t talk about what it takes to stay, or what it means to leave. However, all was not lost! In 2025 I began a fully funded PhD studentship at the University of Birmingham, where my research now explores how care-experienced young people who are multiply minoritised navigate the transition into higher education. Whilst it’s a different focus, it raises the same questions: how systems shape opportunity, and what becomes possible when we understand people in the context of their identities and lives rather than in spite of them.
That same belief, that people can’t be understood apart from their context, has shaped my consultancy work with organisations across public, private and voluntary sectors, including Santander International, DK Publishing, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and Newham Council, developing strategy, facilitating cultural humility training, evaluating national programmes, and working alongside senior leaders. My aim has never been to hand over simple answers. Instead, I work to create the conditions for organisations to ask better questions. My consultancy is built on the belief that curiosity creates reflection, and reflection creates the possibility of doing things differently. People cannot be understood apart from the systems they inhabit. We can’t talk about workplace wellbeing without talking about belonging. We can’t talk about leadership without talking about power. We can’t talk about inclusion without acknowledging how identity shapes the way people experience the world. Everything I’ve done, from working alongside people in active addiction to my doctoral research today, has been an attempt to understand what helps people feel that they matter. If my work has achieved anything, I hope it’s building environments where people, in all their complexity, can truly belong.