Yasmeen Rubidge, MA

Yasmeen Rubidge, facilitator and coach, co-founder and director of South African based Leadership Pathways, has consulted for more than 2 decades in a range of places: United Nations agencies, business boardrooms, organisational retreats, community conversations, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, doing the work of developing leaders, transforming conflict, creating new patterns for diversity, equity, inclusion, making pathways to dismantle racism and imagine humane futures for those made most marginal in our world.

Having grown up in the brutality of apartheid South Africa, it is important for her to make brave spaces for people to open hearts, cross edges into naming discomforting truths, see themselves and each other anew, shift paradigms, re-author ourselves, lead with awareness, heal and flourish.

She knows that group transformation can happen when power is used well and we can name the unspeakable in loves presence. She knows that individual breakthroughs can occur when we can let go of all the things whose time is up and love all the exiled parts of ourselves back into belonging. Her favourite questions are: “what are you noticing” and “what wants to happen next?”

While her formal education includes an MA in Conflict Facilitation and Organisational Change and other coaching and healing modalities, she learns from anywhere – vulnerability in her body breakdowns, participant wisdom in her workshops, ongoing experiences of racism on the street, playing with young fiery daughter, marriage to a white and Jewish man as Black and Muslim woman, nature – to stay real.

She is a lover of swimming in cold seas, silence, playing loud music with her daughter on their drive to school, and gentle horses.

Of all the things, ‘mama’ is hardest earned.