Our team
KAHRA WAYLAND-LARTY
She/her
Founder and Director of Soulwork & Co.
A neuro-spicy, mixed-race Northerner, world-renowned for my unsolicited social justice analyses of any and every topic under the sun.
My passion (and outright nerdiness) for liberatory concepts such as racial justice, healing justice and transformative justice, is deeply rooted in my personal interactions with systems of oppression. I know firsthand the power - and the pain - of working with that personal material, and this understanding is at the heart of how I support clients and communities.
Over the years, through both personal activism and a long career in the charity sector, I've worked shoulder-to-shoulder with communities fighting for change, from council housing residents fighting demolition of their homes, to migrants tackling the hostile environment. I spent five years in the leadership team at a national youth charity, co-producing policy with young people and organising collective action for their human right to mental health.
Moving into the world of 'Diversity and Inclusion', I witnessed how ‘inequality’ is so often stripped of its historical and political roots. Many organisations want to be seen as ‘doing the work’, without grappling with the deep trauma of ancestral and ongoing oppression, or engaging with community-led movements for justice.
With Soulwork & Co., I want to offer support for organisations, leaders and activists to more deeply engage with the reality of working for liberation. My practice draws from various disciplines and training, including Level 2 and 3 certificates in Counselling Skills, additional training in ‘Decolonised Approaches to Therapeutic Practice’ with The Black, African and Asian Therapy Network and my 200-hour yoga teacher training. Combining these therapeutic and somatic modalities with my political grounding and experience in charity leadership, I work to support leaders to consider the role not just of policy and strategy, but of body, spirit, and political/social context in how we imagine and build collective liberation.
I work with trusted associates and collaborators, to bring each client the right combination of skills and expertise.
KAREN LARBI
She/her
Associate Director for Liberatory Practice
A liberatory convenor, facilitator, organisational consultant, social change trainer, Movement Chaplain and somatic coach - Karen brings a wealth of experience, expertise and passion to Soulwork & Co.
As a Senior Associate at social purpose strategy firm Purpose Union, she served as a DEI strategist, project manager, expert facilitator, and researcher on a wide-ranging portfolio, supporting clients to drive social change and meaningfully engage with equity.
As a Trainer at Campaign Bootcamp she led Rooted in Resistance, a training programme for environmental activists of colour, equipping them with the competency, confidence and community they need to take up leadership roles in the environmental movement.
She is the Founder of POC in Nature, an online platform dedicated to helping people of colour explore the healing power of nature, environmental justice and land-honouring ancestral traditions. She previously sat on the England Advisory Committee at the RSPB, the UK’s largest nature conservation charity, and currently serves on their Communications & Engagement Committee.
With a passion for blending her interests in social and climate justice, spirituality, trauma-informed mental health and ecology, she creates transformative spaces that facilitate deep reflection, analysis, and the sharing of experience in order to create frameworks for change on a personal, organisational and community level.
She has provided consultancy, training and facilitation on race equity, power and privilege, climate justice, sustainable activism, organisational change, and more for grassroots and high profile clients, from Decolonising Economics, to The Old Vic, Wellcome Trust, and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
Karen is the founder of Karen Larbi Coaching and Consulting. Her work as an associate with Soulwork & Co. focuses on developing practices, approaches and ways of working that are rooted in the principles of liberation, justice and collective care.