I empower extraordinarily committed change makers to reach their full potential and achieve incredible things. I am a social justice leadership coach and mentor, honorary professor and consultant to non-profits.

I only work with people in social and climate justice spaces because I share their values and I’m committed to supporting their powerful and important missions and their work.

After 25 years of doing social justice work myself, I was painfully aware that an almost total lack of leadership support in non-profits was undermining individual and organisational impact and wellbeing. I’m now on a mission to ensure that professional leadership support and staff wellbeing is the norm, not the exception. As the first ever social justice leadership coach, I provide stealth leadership support from behind the scenes!

I understand the challenges you face. I’ve been there. I spent 25 years as a leader working in social justice spaces in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe in tough conditions, including emergencies and war. I’ve worked for the UN, NGOs and as an academic, rising to the level of full professor of international human rights law.

I’m an International Coaching Federation accredited Professional Certified Coach with over 3000 hours of coaching under my belt. I am a Solution Focused Practitioner and apply a Solution Focused philosophy to all of my work. I specialise in leadership and career coaching for human rights, international legal, climate justice, humanitarian and development organisations and people.

I’ve been empowering, coaching and mentoring social justice leaders for two decades as a professor. I stepped aside from a full time professorship to do this work because I knew I could support activists more effectively moving from a space to “knowing”, into the unknown! I hold honorary academic posts as a Fellow, University of Essex Human Rights Centre and Armed Conflict and Crisis Hub and Extraordinary Professor, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria. I am also a partner, Human Rights Resilience Project and a member of the Executive Board, Universal Rights Group.

I started out working for humanitarian NGOs during the war in Bosnia. I was driven by a desire to assist the victims of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, from where I originally hail. My work involved investigating horrific acts and advocating for justice, equality, and peace as a senior leader, head of office, executive director, advisor and researcher. I established and directed Amnesty International’s first ever field office in Kosovo in 1999, and their second field presence in Afghanistan in 2003.

I founded and served as Executive Director of the UPEACE, Centre for Human rights and I was Executive Director, JGU Centre for the Study of Human Rights. I’ve also directed large academic programs in the human rights and international legal field at the University of Oxford (UK), the UN-mandated University for Peace (Costa Rica) and Jindal Global University, (India).

In 2003, after a traumatic mission in Afghanistan, I had no choice but to focus on my own wellbeing. I became a serious practitioner of yoga, meditation and mindfulness and deepened my enquiry into a wide spectrum of somatic healing practices. I qualified as a yoga teacher in 2005, way before it was trendy – back in the days when doing yoga was considered a thing that only hippies did! I studied yoga and meditation for over a decade and became a senior yoga teacher and teacher trainer. I retrain my status as Senior Yoga Alliance Professional and lifelong student of yoga, meditation and other somatic practices.

My most recent research examines vicarious trauma in the humanitarian and human rights sectors and the ethical responsibilities of human rights organisations. As an academic in recovery, I now prefer to write short, punchy blogs! You can read my blogs here and I’d love to get your feedback, so please do leave me a comment!