Our trainers

Bernadette Ryder

Bernadette has worked in the fields of training, group facilitation and community development for 25 years. From 6 years establishing sustainable resettlement projects with refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, to several years in UK multicultural inner-city areas she has empowered numerous grass roots initiatives including Credit Unions, Community Businesses, local youth facilities, drugs rehabilitation programmes and the establishment of a local Development Trust.

She is fascinated by the role of the intuitive right brain processes in our capacity to learn and effect change in ourselves and in the world. Her approach is holistic, comfortably including intellectual, analytical and experiential processes. She is currently a trainer with “Be the Change” and The Pachamama Alliance as well as Transition Network. She has an unquenchable appetite for fun. She is herself a dancer, a singer an artist and a mediator.

Gerri Smyth

Gerri is an experienced facilitator and coach and business consultant currently working with Transition Scotland Support (the first national transition group funded by central government) to help transition initiatives in Scotland with visioning and energy descent planning. She is also a part time tutor with the Centre for Human Ecology with a focus on place belonging, transformative peer learning and research design. She has an MSc in Human Ecology from Strathclyde University and a Post Graduate Certificate in Spiritual Development and Facilitation from Surrey University. She lives in Leith in Edinburgh and is an active member of Transition Edinburgh City.

Jenny MacKewan (MA, MSc)

Jenny is an international trainer and consultant in the fields of integrative arts psychotherapy, creative organisational development and ecopsychology. She is a fully trained facilitator of both Joanna Macy's deep ecology work and of the transition town/transition business movement. She is a senior lecturer on the MA course in Integrative Arts Psychotherapy at IATE and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bath, School of Management.

Stefan Nicholls

Stefan is a professional social enterprise coach working in a challenged community in Cheshire. He is a director of a Community Interest Company called Chester - The Giant City. His Transition Town activities are split betwen being a member of Boulder Colorado, USA, West Kirby and Chester. He is a graduate of the CTi (Coach Training Institute) Leadership Course held in Sonoma County, California. He is also a trained community organiser (Citizens Organising Foundation). He is currently setting up a Garden Village in Chester along the Transition Model.

Sophy Banks

Sophy set up the first “Heart and Soul” group in Totnes that focuses on the psychology of change, as well as coordinating the TTT central office and systems. A trainer for over 20 years she has worked as an engineer, information systems consultant and psychotherapist and has considerable experience of voluntary sector and community projects.

Mandy Dean

Mandy lives with her children in a small village in the beautiful Ddyfi Valley in mid Wales. She is an initiating group member of Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid which she helped set up in 2007 and has been actively involved with ever since. She has been a teacher and trainer for over 15 years and has worked in sustainable land use research, horticulture, vocational training and is also qualified as a medical herbalist.

She has a long-term interest in traditional land use and low impact ways of living and spent time both in the UK and abroad learning how to do this on a practical level. She discovered the delights of permaculture and gained her design certificate in 1993.

She has taken part in conferences, given talks and run workshops about Transition across Wales as well as in England and Portugal and has been delivering training for the Transition Network since joining the pool in 2008.

May East

May is a Brazilian social change activist who has spent the last 30 years working internationally with music, indigenous people, women, antinuclear, environmental and sustainable human settlements movements. Since 1992 she has lived at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland where she coordinates the Ecovillage Education programmes.

May is the Programme Director of Gaia Education, and has played a prominent role in developing relationships between the United Nations and the Findhorn Ecovillage, culminating in the launch of CIFAL Findhorn in 2006. She facilitates the Club of Budapest World Wisdom Council.

Naresh Giangrande

Co- founder of Transition Town Totnes, the first Transition Town and Transition Training, Naresh has been involved in designing, running and evolving many of the events, groups, and trainings that have been at the heart of the enormously successful Transition Towns project. He has delivered the Training for Transition, Transition Talk Training, Train the Trainers, and Transition training for Local Authorities and organisations to over hundreds of participants in 9 countries.

As one of the Transition Town founders he has given dozens of lectures and interviews, and spoken at many conferences and other public events. He set up and coordinated the energy group of TTT, and is currently a director of TTT ltd. Before the Transition Town Initiative took over his life he lived and worked in an eco community, was Managing Director of a landscape company, and a gaffer in the film industry. He has also taught meditation, has a degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and is father to two lovely daughters.

Hal Gillmore

Hal is from a farming family in South Devon where he now lives with his young family. He is involved in Transition Town Totnes’ outreach activities and also works for Landscope at Dartington Schumacher College, regenerating the landscape through sustainable, land-based business and enterprise. Equally comfortable in a classroom, office or wilderness, Hal’s professional experience includes tourism, training, business development and leading expeditions in Britain and overseas.

Nick Osborne

Over the last 15 years, Nick has worked in a variety of management, leadership, training, consultancy or activist roles with a range of organisations including Changemakers, Shell, Amnesty International and the Ecovillage Network.

Nick has a BSc in Social Philosophy and MSc in Management Development and Social Responsibility. He now works freelance as a Trainer & Consultant, as a founder of Response-Ability, working to help people enhance their ability to respond creatively and flexibly to today’s challenging change and complexity.

Nick has been an active member of Transition Glastonbury since mid 2007, helped develop a network of Transition groups in Somerset and delivered Transition Training nationally to communities since late 2008.

He has a written a course on developing group skills for transition initiatives called ‘Weaving Magic’. Nick is currently developing ways to support all kinds of organisations to make a paradigm shift- to become resilient organisations which sustain the social and ecological sytems on which they depend.
Nick lives in Glastonbury, Somerset and is passionate about his family, social change and surfing. nick@response-ability.org.uk Response-Ability.org.uk

Mike Payne

Mike Payne is a coach supporting people and organisations in the ‘not for profit’, business and state sectors - Benchmark Coaching. He is one of the initiators of ‘Vale Villages in Transition’, a rural Transition initiative outside Nottingham. Mike worked with the New Economics Foundation developing coaching methods in low income urban areas and supporting economic activity ‘as if people and the planet mattered’. He is also co-founder of The Biy Project which focuses on learning by doing as the means to support organisations seeking change within their own environment.

Inez Aponte

Inez Aponte has been a professional storyteller and workshop facilitator since 1997. She was a member of Transition Bristol for a year and a half until moving to Totnes in September 2009. Her main focus there was communications and volunteer recruitment. At Transition conferences you will find her teaching harmony singing to innocent passers-by and she is currently on a mission to get the nation to slow down and bake bread with her latest project 'Loaves of Love'.

Hamid van Koten

Hamid van Koten (BA/Hons) is a lecturer and researcher in Design & Sustainability at the University of Dundee. He is currently involved in bringing together Local Authorities and Community groups in order to develop carbon reduction strategies. Hamid has lived and worked in a number of intentional communities and sits on the coordinating group of the North Howe Transition Town, in the heart of rural Fife, Scotland.

Ann Lamot

Ann originates from Belgium, but lives with her husband and two children in Mid Wales. She is a steering group member of Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid and a member of their food group.

A qualified adult education teacher, she has facilitated workshops and ran courses for over ten years. She has delivered the Training for Transition in five countries, given talks and co-hosted many events for her local initiative.

She has an ongoing interest in community organization and social justice. A keen gardener, when not busy with Transition related activities, she can be found in her polytunnel growing odd coloured vegetables for a local market co-operative.

Before Transition came into her life, she was a craft worker and teacher, traveler and dreamer.