Sitting alongside clients as a trusted advisor, collaborator, and sounding board who offers impartial and constructive feedback, guidance.
I work with individuals, studios, collectives, networks and organisations of all sizes across place, community development and culture sectors as a Critical Friend – a role that transcends mere expertise but provides a unique blend of challenge and encouragement aimed at fostering sustainable growth, innovation, and self-reflection.
Acting as both a catalyst for change and a guardian of integrity, a Critical Friend offers fresh perspectives, asks probing questions, and facilitates dialogue to stimulate critical thinking and decision-making. By cultivating a culture of openness, trust, and mutual respect, a Critical Friend catalyses positive change, promotes continuous learning, and empowers individuals and organisations to realize their full potential.
My approach is characterised by empathy, authenticity, and a commitment to the holistic development and success of my counterparts.
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Critical Friend.
With you every step of the way as an honest and caring partner in your practice.
Whatever that practice is - artist, cultural practitioner, academic, community or sector leader for example - working with your ambitions, musings, fears and real and perceived obstacles, through blocks and tasks, to get you operating from values and to purpose and taking up the place you want to in the world.
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Critical Friend - Plus-One.
Transformation from the inside out of your team, studio, collective, organisation, community or network.
Co-created tools, interventions, models, roadmaps, resources and programmes to get your group endeavour and all its stewards and stakeholders working in a culture of appreciation and accountability, with smart system and processes and dynamic vision and values.
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Place Partners.
Supporting you to make connections, nurture partnerships and collaborate with communities, anchored in impactful place-based practices and values.
Whether you are co- or re-locating, starting up or wanting to transform your work in places, working with you to co-create wide, deep and meaningful relationships, exchanges and experiences with the people of place, whether they be community, practitioner, organisation or network, all aiming to bring and add value to your work and the place you are part of.
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Radical Care.
Performance over productivity, rethinking wellness and welfare in what you do.
Bringing into the frame the continuous pursuit of equity and justice, understanding care as a motivation and driver for transformation, working with you to disrupt the norm of how people think and behave at work - with themselves and others.
Pay It Forward.
I run a Pay It Forward scheme to co-fund emerging talent.
What People Are Saying
“I have both seen and experienced first-hand Cara’s capacity to, with a light touch, identify genuine potential in individuals or groups whose sense of themselves has been challenged or injured. She has a disarming ability to ignite and engage a person's internal vision for themselves - sensitively and quietly, yet with real passion, inviting them into their own story. This has been a revelation to me in working with Cara.”
— D, Nettleford
“Cara goes deeper into working to support creatives, cultural and community leaders and academics to live and be well in the places in which they work. Often, these practitioners are overworked and under-resourced and face specific challenges to health and wellbeing, operating on the front line of complex situations.”
— M, Dublin
“Cara understands the increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world and its impact on the practitioners who are currently underserved, yet have a great need for specific and nuanced knowledge of the field and the system in which they operate in order to implement kindness and wellbeing at work.”