Help Lydia Work With Sudanese Community This July

Founded in 2023, Collective Circles was brought to life by 3 women from Sudan and Egypt, seeking to support and heal the Sudanese diaspora following the war and conflicts in Sudan.

We are now working with many groups of Sudanese women who have been displaced and affected by the war to support their mental well-being through designing and facilitating trauma healing and empowerment workshops.

We are so excited to bring Lydia Violet Harutoonian to our community in the UK in July to train us in Joanna Macy's "Work That Reconnects," a body of work that the women in our workshops have already fallen in love with, and we desire deeper training in the fundamentals of this work, of which Lydia is a scholar and well-practiced practitioner. Lydia's training will empower us in our work directly within our Sudanese contituents. We also want to work with Lydia because of her own MENA roots and have already felt a great comradery and resonance with her and the way she holds her work in the world

Our workshops support Sudanese women in reclaiming their power through reclaiming their bodies and their connection with nature, themselves, and their communities. We create online and in-person safe spaces for them intending to enhance their social integration and engagement in the peace-making processes.

This budget covers Lydia's flights, paying our facilitator and organizers a fair, livable wage, venue rental, meals, and materials.

Our team

Dr Mawada Adam

Mawada Adam is a Sudanese-British Consultant Psychiatrist based in the UK. Mawada's keen interests include Afrocentric analytical approaches to healing trauma in the Diaspora as well as Cultural and Spiritual Psychiatry.

Rana Bilal

Rana is a Sudanese Social Activist, Coach, Facilitator and part-time dentist based in the UK. Her areas of expertise are women empowerment and leadership, regenerative activism and social transformation. She has 15 years of experience in delivering socially relevant and culturally competent training and facilitation.

Suzan Shedid Elsayed

Suzan Shedid Elsayed is an Egyptian Meditation and Breathwork Instructor, with over a decade of experience working in tech and management consulting. She is currently a Transpersonal Integrative Psychotherapy student at the Centre for Counselling & Psychotherapy Education (CCPE) in London, UK.

Lydia Violet Harutoonian

Lydia has also studied dedicatedly with deep ecology elder and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy for the past 15 years, learning how we can metabolize planetary despair, anxiety, and community traumas into energy for resilience, action, and community healing. She founded and runs The School for The Great Turning, which creates access to an education that will empower humanity's life-sustaining legacy.