Our Team
Our internationally-based team of facilitators, coaches, mentors, and mediators have an extensive combined experience of providing development. We work collaboratively with organisations, individuals, groups, teams, and communities to explore desired impacts, locate essence, and refine practice.
Core Team
Rivca Rubin
Founder and Deliverer
UK & Germany
About
Key interests: The impact of how we communicate relating to all endeavours, relations and structures
Specialisms: Organisational-Team-Leadership-Individual Development
My guiding principle is to increase collective care and relieve working and living from avoidable pressures and systems of superiority. I work with organisations, collectives, and artists to define the vision and desired impacts, refine practices and co-create mutually beneficial living and working climates.
Charles Lauder
Co-founder and Deliverer
UK
About
Key interests: Organisational and Team Development, Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
Specialisms: Communication and Presentation Skills, DEI Development
Since collaborating with Rivca from the outset, I incorporate Upwording within my own practice of coaching, communication and presentation skills, and DEI, and I find the peer practice sessions challenging, convivial, informative, and supportive.
Delivery Team
Katja Sonneman
Facilitator, mentor and consultant
Germany
About
Key interests: Cooperation and collaboration, scrutinise habits, system change
Specialisms: Thinking companion, questionartist, system spotter, critical thinker, listener
As a witness of several deliveries of Upwording I had the luck to observe the impact Upwording has on groups sharing time and space and thinking: from being next to each other to being with each other. Upwording has sharpened my attention to nuances and strengthened my listening-muscle as a practitioner and peer practicer.
Claire Antrobus
Coach
UK
About
Specialisms: Enabling organisational and individual change as a coach, trainer and facilitator. Leadership development. Executive coaching. Action Learning. Team dynamics and development.
I’ve been using the techniques and principles that underpin upwording for around a decade in my work as a coach and facilitator, particularly around enabling individuals to have Crucial Critical Conversations more easily. I also use upwording in my own professional and personal relationships, including as a parent of teenage children. For me upwording reveals the choices we might not be aware we are making and offers the possibility of being and doing differently.
Zden Brungot Svíteková
Dance artist
Czech Republic & Slovakia
About
Very early in the first encounter with what later become Upwording I wished this would have been part of the curriculum at elementary school. In the same right as the most "important" subjects. How much difference it would make for any relation in life.
Federico Schwindt
Theatre & Performance
Germany
About
Key interests: Art with more desire at its centre
Specialisms: Performance arts
Upwording my language has meant a more desire-oriented, clearer and less overwhelming art practice.
Jenn Wilson
Artist & Producer
UK
About
Key Interests: Queering, consent, neurodivergence, community-building, modelling new paradigms.
Specialisms: ADHD so I'm good at thinking laterally and in imaginative ways and generating ideas; writing; performing; arts fund raising; being provocative/activist/instigating; coaching; queering; consent culture; public speaking/presenting; translating ideas/mediating/facilitating.
Upwording has helped me notice the ways I communicate in all my different relationships, including the one with myself. It has given me the language to express my values and intentions, to "be the change I want to see in the world". It's changed my life and helped me to support others with the changes they want to make - my family, my friends, and all the people I work with or seek to influence. Words really do change worlds.
Dyane Neiman
Coach & Storyteller
Germany
About
Key interests: We can all live a life of choice.
Specialisms: I have a "special" connection to creatives who feel stuck; and I specialise in coaching people to discover the power of their voice and their stories to move people to action.
I was stuck in a high-conflict situation and asked Rivca Rubin for a group coaching. In just one session, she created seismic movement, in the group and for me as a coach by raising awareness of our word choices. It was life-changing! I now use these powerful ideas from Upwording in my coaching, training, parenting, and with myself.
Peer Ambassadors & Critical Friends
Those who contribute to the ongoing development of the practice of Upwording, and approaches to engagement and dissemination.
Jack McConnell
Illustrator
UK
Mariana Renthel
Maker, Artist & Professor
Colombia
Annika Tudeer
Performer Facilitator
Finland
Mara Nedelcu
Cultural Manager
Belgium & Germany
Roshana Rubin Mayhew
Research Practitioner
UK & Italy
Elena Polzer
Theatre producer & Fibre Artist
Germany
Meg Foley
Artist
USA
Denise Bowler
Community collaborator and facilitator
UK
Maurice Carlin
Writer & Artist
UK & Spain
Rachel Goodyear
Artist
UK
Bill Campbell
Artist
UK
Astarte Cara
Artist & Fashion designer
UK
Fleur de Bondt
Facilitator
South Africa
Chris Paul
Mediator, trustee and charity CEO
UK
Helen Dodd
Organic veg grower and trainer
UK
Steve Purcell
Arts and Education Consultant
UK