As Co-Founder and Managing Director of a growing social enterprise Resilience Learning Partnership, Shumela Ahmed is a teacher and educator by trade and an activist at heart.  As a real life example of the transformation education can bring to someone’s life, she has dedicated her academic and professional career to helping others realise this too.  As an adult returner to education and as someone who left school at aged 14 she knows first hand the power that education holds in providing the tools for those from disadvantaged backgrounds to succeed in life. As the leader of a Lived Experienced led organisation its Shumela’s ambition to see Lived Experience as the dominating force within public policy design across the UK.

She feels passionately that the key to achieving this ambition lies within the learning and development of staff and adopting a new approach that has Lived Experience expertise at the heart of it.  She is also a passionate advocate of the renumeration of those with Lived Experience involved in public policy design and the recognition that this expertise brings a dynamic to L&D work not currently utilised in the sector.

As a co-author of the National Trauma Training Plan, Shumela continues to target Resilience Learning Partnership’s core activities towards enhancing the learning and development of staff across local authority, 3rd and private sector organisations.  As well as being a co-author of the National Trauma Training Plan, Shumela advises Scottish Government in the continued development of the National Trauma Training Programme and the implementation of Trauma Informed Practice across Scotland.

Dr David Atkinson is both an award-winning researcher and a practitioner of enterprise and entrepreneurship in their widest sense. His monograph, Thinking the Art of Management, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. With a new book project nearing submission, his interest in applied philosophy accompanies 15+ years commercial, entrepreneurial and organisational leadership experience, built on an extensive career as a communications and IT & systems analyst, consultant project engineer and manager in public service. With one of his more recent ventures, he held a position in the StartUps.co.uk ‘Top 100 startups to watch’. for three consecutive years.

David is openly, and proudly autistic. In 2000, he embarked on an academic journey while engaging in business creation. Since 2018, he has been working part-time in academia, where his neuro-divergent free-thinking and curious nature have been central to what and how he achieves what he does. His focus in his new book project is on developing his past and current research and experience of embedding critical philosophical approaches to sensemaking about the reality of capitalist enterprise. This offers potential benefits to understanding our place within the moral, social and political dimensions of socio-economic organisational praxis.

In short: David thinks critically about our emergence in an uncertain world of socio-economic, enterprising work.

Compassion for all is Sal’s guiding principle. She brings literature, particularly poetry, and play to the conversation in order to bypass habitual thinking and allow people to take themselves by surprise with their responses.

Experiential learning, where we learn something through experiencing a shift, in our understanding, is more likely to help us find something new in ourselves than any amount of reading textbooks, attending lectures or seminars, and sitting tests or exams. It is also results in expanded appreciation of ourselves and others, and of how we can choose a new response in order to get a transformed result.

Sal came to InterBe after; 20 years in education, an NLP Diploma, Practitioner, and two Master Practitioner trainings, coaching certification and a Narrative Coaching programme. All of her training has been in the form of experiential learning and has had a deep impact on her way of being.

She is particularly inspired by literature and film; the pioneering work of Michael White; and, since 2006, by working with Mo and Simon at InterBe.

Minter Dial is an international professional and energetic speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialised in leadership, branding and transformation. An agent of change, he’s a three-time entrepreneur who has exercised twelve different métiers and changed country fifteen times.

Minter’s core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division. He’s author of the award-winning WWII story, The Last Ring Home (documentary film and biographical book, 2016) as well as two prize-winning business books, Futureproof (2017) and Heartificial Empathy (2019). His next book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader (Kogan Page) comes out in January 2021.

He’s been host of the Minter Dialogue weekly podcast since 2010. He is passionate about the Grateful Dead, Padel Tennis, languages and generating meaningful conversations. @mdial / minterdial.com   

His new book, You Lead, How Being Yourself Makes You A Better Leader (by Kogan Page), which launches Jan 3, is available at all fine etailers.

John Preston joined The Conservation Volunteers (then BTCV) whilst still at school, after a degree (geography and statistics) at St Andrews.

He came to Leeds as a live-in Long Term Volunteer at Hollybush Conservation Centre.

After 18 months in Doncaster with BTCV on Community Programme he came back to Leeds as a Project Officer. For 20 years he was the “Centre Manager” of Hollybush, leading its evolution into the busy inclusive environmental volunteering centre it is today.

In 2018 he moved sideways to be Business Development Manager for TCV covering the North (Liverpool to Hull) this role has a strong Leeds focus as 15% of TCV nationally is Leeds. 

He continues to contribute to environmental and general third sector forums. 

Outside of work he is a volunteer recorder and speaker for the BTO and holds a private pilot licence.