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Your teams deliver under pressures most sectors never see. Tight timelines. Impossible mandates. Underfunded programmes. Trauma that does not stop when the workday does. And for all of it, the expectation of composure.
You already know the numbers. Decades of research across humanitarian and UN settings show elevated rates of burnout, psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and PTSD among aid and field staff. You also already know what those numbers mean in practice — the attrition, the sick leave, the quiet departures from the sector, the colleagues who never quite returned to themselves after a mission.
Staff care is not a wellness perk. It is operational resilience. And in an environment where duty-of-care expectations are rising faster than budgets, it is also a matter of institutional credibility.
That is the space these workshops are designed for.
Workshops and trainings are typically commissioned by:
I work with organisations of all sizes — from small specialised NGOs to large UN agencies and multinational employers — and across teams ranging from headquarters staff to field missions.
I spent more than a decade inside the international sector as a human rights lawyer, including years with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. When I speak about deployment fatigue, moral injury, duty stations, or the specific loneliness of this work — I am not reading from a slide. I lived it.
Every workshop is grounded in established trauma-informed, somatic, and organisational wellbeing research. You will not get motivational posters or "self-care" platitudes. You will get frameworks, tools, and language that participants actually take back into their work.
I do not deliver the same session twice. Every workshop is designed around the specific realities of your team — sector, field vs. HQ, recent exposures, cultural composition, prior training, and the honest questions you want to address but have not known how to open.
Staff wellbeing workshops fail when participants feel observed, judged, or obligated to perform wellness. My sessions are structured to protect participants first — with confidentiality, realistic expectations, and no forced disclosure.
Every engagement is tailored, but these are the themes most often requested. All topics can be adapted to 1-hour, 1.5-hour, or half-day formats depending on depth and discussion time required.
Understanding what burnout actually is (and isn’t), how it builds in high-exposure roles, and the practical, system-level and personal practices that protect sustainable engagement. Suited to both field and HQ teams.
The specific cost of caring deeply about other people’s suffering as part of the work. Framework, warning signs, and practical tools for recognition, prevention, and recovery. Particularly relevant for programmatic, MHPSS, legal, investigative, and frontline staff.
Perhaps the most under-discussed wound of this sector. The distress of witnessing or being part of actions that violate your deepest sense of right and wrong — and how it differs from burnout or PTSD. A brave, reflective space for teams ready for this conversation.
Practical, evidence-based techniques for staff working in chronically activating environments. How to recognise dysregulation, how to return to baseline, and how to build reserves for the next demand. Somatic, accessible, and immediately usable.
What psychological safety actually requires inside a team — beyond the buzzword. Honest communication, productive disagreement, and the conditions under which staff can actually raise hard things with leadership and each other.
For roles where the job description could stretch endlessly. How to hold professional purpose without absorbing institutional dysfunction. Particularly useful for mid-level managers and team leads.
Preparing staff for the emotional realities of deployment; supporting them on return; holding space for the unspoken shifts in identity, relationships, and meaning that long or repeated missions create.
For teams navigating organisational change, sector contraction, funding cuts, or the loss of colleagues and mandates. The multidimensional grief that is rarely named — and rarely held.
A reflective space for leaders carrying responsibility for others. Sustainable leadership, holding space without collapsing into it, and the specific weight of leading people through collective difficulty.
If what your team needs is not on this list, it can likely be built. Reach out and we’ll discuss.
Duration Options
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Format
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Best For
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1 hour
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Introduction to a topic, team reflection, awareness-raising, embedding into an existing meeting or retreat
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1.5 hours
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Focused interactive workshop on a single theme with meaningful discussion time
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Half-day (3–4 hours)
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In-depth engagement, multiple connected themes, deeper group processing
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Series / multi-session
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Sustained learning, leadership development, cohort-based work across a team
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Sessions delivered in English, French, or Dutch, depending on your team’s composition.
Workshops work best with 8–25 participants for interactivity. Larger formats (keynote-style or townhall) can be designed but operate differently — let’s discuss the right fit during the discovery call.
We talk about your team, the pressures they are navigating, what has already been tried, what you are hoping to achieve, and what success would look like. No commitment at this stage.
Within a week, I send a written proposal covering objectives, format, content outline, delivery logistics, investment, and any pre-work for participants. You review, adjust, and approve.
Depending on the engagement, preparation may include a confidential pulse survey of participants, one-to-one conversations with team leads, or review of relevant internal context. This is how sessions stay tailored rather than generic.
The workshop or training is delivered — in person, online, or hybrid — with space for real conversation, not just one-way transmission.
Every engagement includes a follow-up touchpoint with the commissioning contact to debrief, share observations (anonymised, never individual), and discuss what might support sustained impact.
Many organisations return for subsequent cycles — annual staff care programming, new cohorts, different teams, or deeper follow-up work through group peer support or individual counselling referrals for staff who want them.
Staff wellbeing work is only effective when participants trust that what they share will not find its way back to HR files or management conversations.
Participants: What is said in the room stays in the room. Nothing individual is reported back to the organisation — ever.
Commissioning organisations receive:
themes, patterns, engagement levels
what the group seemed to need, what might support it further
for duty-of-care documentation, audit, or board reporting
This boundary is set out in writing at the proposal stage and never compromised in practice. It is what makes the work effective.
Workshops and trainings are quoted per engagement based on:
Typical engagements range from a single focused 1-hour session for a team to multi-session programmes spanning weeks or months. I am happy to work within defined budgets — tell me what is available, and I will tell you honestly what is possible within it.
If you are responsible for staff wellbeing, duty of care, HR, or programme management — and something here resonates with what your team is navigating — the starting point is a short conversation.
I do not currently offer formal certifications. For training-of-trainers or cascaded programmes — where your internal staff champions carry the work forward — a custom engagement can be designed. This typically suits organisations building internal staff care capacity over time.
That is useful information. Sessions can be pitched at a lighter, awareness-raising level — useful as a first step, or when readiness is uneven across a team. Building psychological safety often precedes the deeper work; we can sequence accordingly.
Yes, when clinically and ethically appropriate. To protect confidentiality and avoid role conflict, this is always handled through explicit conversation with the participant, and where relevant, with the commissioning organisation. See individual counselling for more.
Short-format sessions can sometimes be arranged within 2–4 weeks, depending on availability. Larger tailored engagements or series are best planned 6–8 weeks ahead to allow time for proposal development, pre-work, and scheduling across distributed teams.
Most wellbeing training is delivered by trainers who understand the concepts but have not worked inside the sector. The specificity of humanitarian, UN, and international work — deployment cycles, mandate tension, moral injury, the emotional weight of bearing witness — is often missing. These sessions are built by and for this specific context, from the inside.
Yes. Online and hybrid formats are specifically designed for distributed teams, with facilitation adapted for virtual participation. For some engagements, a mix of central online sessions and localised in-person follow-ups works well.
Yes, and this is often one of the highest-impact forms of engagement. Leaders in demanding sectors carry a specific weight that few spaces are safe enough to name. Leadership-only reflective cohorts are available.
A safe space for reflection, healing, and growth. Offering personalised therapy and counselling in Geneva and online to help you navigate stress, trauma, and life’s challenges with clarity and care.
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