Innovation culture, despite its name, has some fairly fixed ideas about the journey from idea to impact. The result can be devastating to the mental health of founders. And it can exclude altogether those whose brains and lives work differently. The result is to deprive the world full of wicked problems many of the solutions it desperately needs.

I work with incubators and individuals to change that. Ideally, teams running an incubator or innovation ecosystem would hire me as a consultant to help them make their processes more empowering, and to mentor neurodivergent founders, but I am happy for individuals or organizations who want to work with me to get in touch.

I have 15 years of experience campaigning, researching, consulting, and speaking on mental health, neurodivergence, and how to empower disabled people to reach their true potential by enabling them to use their full range of talents while providing the full range of support they need in order to do so. 

I am determined to use this experience of working with some of the most senior people in business, government, and research; combined with my experience of the innovation and start-up scene; and my own lived experiences of ADHD, Bipolar Disorder and Dyspraxia, to make the start-up space more empowering. As a society we desperately need the creative ideas neurodivergent founders and those with mental health conditions bring. But to do that we need to create a start-up culture that empowers, and we need mentors and coaches to help these founders focus on their strengths.

A selective sample of experience:

  • Current member of the Advisory Board of the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute
  • I was on the steering group that drew up the Debt and Mental Health Evidence Form for UK-based GPs.
  • Delivered the 2017 Oxford Disability Lecture on the subject, “A Future Not to Feel Sad About”
  • Shortlisted for the inaugural Oxford University Vice Chancellor’s Diversity Awards for the workshop “Looking Behind the Label” which I have run with a colleague more than 30 times
  • Speaker at conferences such as Advice UK’s annual conference; Mental Wealth; Money Talks; the annual conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators
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