About Shanea
Bio
Shanea (she/her) is an award-winning programme manager, strategist, advocate, and creative facilitator. Her practice is rooted in community care, healing justice, and trauma-informed approaches, informed by feminist, decolonial, and somatic frameworks. She has over eight years of experience leading and coordinating impactful projects across the UK, blending strategic design, creative practice, and relational care to cultivate meaningful change.
Shanea creates capacity for connection and transformation. Drawing on her experience as a wellness practitioner, facilitator, writer, coach, and leader of wellness programmes and international retreats, her work asks what it would take to design initiatives that centre joy, creativity, inclusion, and collective wellbeing. She works alongside organisations and communities to hold space, imagine, co-create, and build, exploring how projects can honour the intersections of arts, justice, healing, and collective growth.
Her practice is grounded in reflective and reflexive learning, creative and embodied facilitation, and community-led, participatory methodologies, held within trauma-informed, care-led, and intersectional ways of working. Shanea is particularly interested in how supporting organisations to integrate learning, evidence, and care frameworks into their work, creating spaces where individuals and communities can thrive together.
She has led work across grassroots and national organisations and is the former Director of Your Life More Life CIC, an organisation dedicated to community care, healing, and empowerment. Shanea currently works as a freelance programme manager, designing and delivering experiences rooted in collective care and organising, including international wellness retreats and grassroots projects.
Professional Qualifications and Training
2023 | Power Labs: Community Organising & Movement Building Programme
2022 | Therapeutic Communications with Children & Young People
2021 | RedCross First Aid Training; Street Doctors Emergency First Aid Training
2020 | Youth Mental Health First Aid; Trauma-Informed Practice & Contextual Safeguarding; Youth Realities Domestic Violence Training; AQA Community Holistic Therapeutic Mentoring, The GreenLeaf Trust
2019 | Science of Violence: Trauma-Informed Practitioner Skills; Social Ark Step-Up Entrepreneurship Programme
Awards and Publications
Family of Therapy Journal Publication with systemic therapist Taiwo Afuape Beyond Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Drawing on liberation psychology and transformative justice to address institutional and community violence in young Black lives (2022)
Rotary Club - Citizen Peacemaker Award (2021)
The Diana Award (2020)
Million Minutes - Peace & Solidarity Award (2020)
Rotary Club - Community Hero of the Year (2020)
Recent Experience
Founding Director
Shanea was the founding director of Your Life More Life CIC, a grassroots organisation she built from the ground up. She established the board, fundraised thousands of pounds, and partnered with local leaders, including the Mayor of Newham, to drive meaningful change in the community. Through this work, she created spaces for collective care, empowerment, and community-led projects that responded directly to local needs.
Therapeutic Practice
Trainee
At The 4Front Project, Shanea worked closely with young people in local communities and criminal legal system settings, providing therapeutic support and delivering creative wellbeing programmes. She facilitated workshops and safe spaces that centred wellness, healing and political education.
Programme Manager
At YoungMinds UK, Shanea led two national youth engagement programmes that support young people to advocate for change in mental health systems. She organised workshops, events, and roundtables, managed teams, and developed community partnerships, creating meaningful ways for young people to shape campaigns and influence policy.
Shanea also identifies as a..
A soul sister, a believer, a writer, a dreamer, a visionary, a space holder, a destiny helper, a storyteller, an advocate, a nurturer, a hope bearer, an ode to joy, love, justice and community. She believes in a better world, in humanity, and that our systems can and should be radically different. She believes in the freedom of all oppressed people, and in the preservation of self, and that looking after oneself is inherently political. A lover of music, dance, and nature as medicine, she gifts her nervous system with ease and holds space for others to do the same.