Hi, I’m Jo Musker-Sherwood (she/her); culture worker, mother and deeply feeling human.

Coming to environmental work in my early twenties filled my life with meaning, but after time it began to take an unbearable toll. I thought that perhaps it was a ‘me’ problem. That I was too sensitive, needed too much, was too much.

After giving my all to founding a fast growing organisation I truly believed in, I was devastated to realise I would need to leave. I was mentally and physically broken, scared for my own financial survival and full of despair about whether it was really possible to make any kind of meaningful change in the world.

What I wish I could have told myself then was that this burnout experience was a kind of dying experience that would ultimately birth a whole new way for me to be in the world.

I see our individual experiences, such as burnout, as an expression of our collective experiences under late stage capitalism. There is a dying to the old way of violently extracting from ourselves and each other that needs to happen in order for us to adapt, survive and thrive.

With that in mind, I have come to believe that some of our most courageous acts of resistance start from within ourselves, rippling out.

Through culture work, workshops, facilitation, 1:1 mentoring, and my online programmes I come alongside changemakers and changemaking organisations who want to find healthy, non-violent and transformational ways of being in the world.

Drawing especially on the wisdom of grief tending practices, nature/ body connection, and radical governance practices, for example, I help people find their most powerful and authentic way of turning up to the work that is there’s to do in the world.