I am a passionate advocate for young people and feel their explosive potential and energy is misunderstood, undervalued and underutilised.  I’ve had the privilege of working with youth for 15 years, designing and delivering workshops that explore the challenging terrain our teenagers are growing up within.  Young people are living in a world most adults struggle to understand, and exposed to content most adults couldn’t stomach.  While we fumble awkwardly looking for ways to have the conversation with them, they are already engaged in an unfiltered unmoderated conversation about everything we fear.

I’m extremely passionate about my work with young people, particularly training facilitators and guiding organisations that serve as guardians of a powerful and unique time in a human life.  Adolescence is an explosion of biological and psychological life.  It is a coming of age.  A time of firsts. It's an exciting time where having needed nurture and protection for over a decade they are about to receive the world in their hands. They are about to be let out into the world to see what they can create of their lives and what influence they can have on the world as the next in the lineage of generations to inherit the responsibility for our world. 

Therefore we need to be courageous enough to create environments where they can challenge life and ask questions about it. To have an unfiltered dialogue about how their lives are going, what they want to make of them, who they want to become and what meaningful mark they wish to make on the world.

THE SOAR FOUNDATION (IRELAND)

For the past four years, I’ve been spending a portion of my year in Ireland guiding the founders of The Soar Foundation, a powerful and timely youth organisation inspiring Ireland's young people.  My focus has been delivering an advanced facilitation training program for 40 young people to deliver powerful development workshops nationwide.  Benefited by 14 years with the Reach Foundation running thousands of initiatives including ten years training facilitators and a four-year stint as a director on the board, it is a real passion of mine to continue advocating for youth and sharing my experiences working with them.  Additional responsibilities include consultation and coaching with the co-founders on organisational culture and direction.

SPEAKER AND ADVOCATE

I’m a passionate speaker and advocate for the potential of youth as a keynote speaker, conference chair or holding on stage interviews with young people.  Above is a video of a speaking engagement for The Young Minds conference a 2000 strong event to celebrate young minds and their potential. 

THE REACH FOUNDATION

I came of age as a facilitator at The Reach Foundation designing and facilitating workshops, training 140 facilitators and sitting as a Board member for four years.  I delivered 300 workshops a year and was an organisational cultural leader, advisor the CEO and handled facilitation of major corporate events and fundraisers amongst other responsibilities.