Coaching · Opening 2027
Room to move.
One-to-one coaching for mid-senior practitioners, women and caregivers who hold more power than their job description admits — and less than the problem requires.
Join the 2027 listMost of us do not have a confidence problem. We have a position problem.
You know what good design looks like. You wrote the strategy people still quote back to you. And you still spent last quarter drafting a proposal in language you do not believe, sitting inside a restructure nobody consulted you on, doing the care work at six in the morning and nine at night that no workplan has ever counted as labour.
The sector’s answer to this is resilience — asking people to cope with what is harming them, and then calling the coping a skill. We are not going to do that here.
Guilt is private and it goes nowhere. Precision about your position — what you hold, who you can reach, what you can survive — is where the room to move begins.
Two doors in.
Most people arrive through one and leave through the other. Both are welcome.
Something has to change, and you are the one who has to change it.
A funder relationship. A budget line. A team. A decision that keeps arriving after it has already been made. You are not looking for permission to be angry. You are looking for the specific move that is actually available from where you sit.
You are pivoting.
Out, sideways, or into something of your own. You want the decision made from analysis rather than from exhaustion — and you want to leave without leaving your politics behind in the building.
That includes the consultancy, social enterprise or collective you have been sketching in the margins of your day job: how to structure it, what to offer, how to price it without extracting from the people you want to serve, and how to build it so it does not become a worse boss than the one you left.
Three things we work with.
Not a curriculum. Three lines of attention that run through every session.
Your position
We start where you actually stand: money, decisions, access, risk. What moves through your hands. Which rooms you can reach that others are kept from. What you could survive that someone more exposed could not. Most of us overestimate what is stuck and undercount what is movable.
Your design
Whatever you are weighing — a reform, a role, a business — we test it. Does power sit in more hands afterwards? Does the next demand get easier to win? Or could the institution absorb this and carry on entirely unchanged?
Your body
This work is held somewhere. The dread before a meeting, the flatness on a Friday, the way one name in an inbox changes your breathing. That is data, not weakness. We work with what you are carrying rather than around it, drawing on healing justice traditions that never separated the personal from the structural in the first place.
Regeneration has to cost something.
A value that costs nothing is a value statement. So we put your working life inside the same frame we use for programme design — a floor nobody falls below, and a ceiling nothing gets pushed past.
The floor
Social foundation. Nobody falls below this — including you.
Rest, money, care, relationship, and whatever practice keeps you legible to yourself. We name yours in hours and numbers rather than intentions, because a floor you cannot count is a floor you will quietly give away.
The limit
Regenerative ceiling. Nothing gets pushed past this.
What your attention, your health and your household can carry without drawing down something that cannot be replaced. The work then gets designed to run inside it, rather than the limit being treated as the thing that failed.
How it runs.
Six sessions across four to six months, ninety minutes each, online and across time zones. One live problem followed properly, rather than a new topic every fortnight. A short piece of written work between sessions, and you can write to me in between.
Nothing you bring here travels. Not to your organisation, not into cohort material, not into a case study.
Places are capped, deliberately. Coaching opens in 2027, alongside ICF accreditation.
Dr Jessica Oddy-Atuona
Fifteen years across humanitarian response, philanthropy and social enterprise, working in and around 42 countries. I led the design of education programmes in emergencies in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Central African Republic and Colombia — and set up United Nations-led education coordination in Iraq and for the Whole of Syria response, bringing forty-plus civil society and UN actors into one room.
I have stewarded a £14M research and learning portfolio, secured £5M of new institutional funding, and led the co-design of a $12M multi-country proposal across five countries. I have negotiated budgets with UNHCR, ECHO, USAID, FCDO, UNICEF, Dubai Cares, NORAD and The National Lottery Community Fund. I have also sat on the other side of that table, at Director level inside an intermediary fund, deciding what gets learned from and what gets resourced across a network of more than 400 community-rooted organisations.
I hold a PhD from the University of East London. My published work on race, power and design in education in emergencies sits on reading lists at universities internationally, and I have taught or spoken at Columbia, UCL, King’s College London, Georgetown, Laguna College and Toronto.
I am also a mother, building a business . I am not going to coach you toward a version of this life I have not tried to live myself.
Track record
- 15+ years, 42 countries
- £14M portfolio stewarded
- £5M raised; $12M proposal co-designed
- 150+ practitioners trained across 30+ countries
- PhD, University of East London
- ICF accreditation, 2027
Trusted to train
The National Lottery Community Fund · British Red Cross · Association of Charitable Foundations · Save the Children · Plan International · Norwegian Refugee Council · IIED
What this is not.
Not therapy, and not a substitute for it. Not a CV rewrite, though your CV may well change. Not wellness. Not a room where you have to explain your politics before you can describe your problem. And not a promise that the institution will change — only that you will stop mistaking its limits for yours.
What does it cost?
Are you accredited?
Is this confidential?
Coaching opens in 2027.
No countdown, no launch window, no scarcity. Join the list and I will write to you once, when it is real.
Join the 2027 list
Tell me where you are right now, so the first conversation starts in the right place.
One email when coaching opens. Nothing else.
