Who are we?
This page has been updated, Please see our current Team page here.
Our roots
It is important to us to make our background and roots visible as we recognise that these significantly shape the partial perspectives Starter Culture has been birthed from. Meanwhile we are in the process of growing and diversifying our core team and wider Starter Culture family.
Starter Culture founders
Starter Culture's founders are Jo Hamilton, Eva Schonveld and Claire Milne. We are three white, middle class, cis-gendered women from relatively privileged backgrounds in the UK (Scotland and England).
These things are both trivial and central to who we are. Reducing people to a series of identities misses the depth, complexity and uniqueness of each individual miracle; ignoring the family, social and cultural context that we have grown up in and inhabit as an adult misses endless insight into the likely assumptions, motivations and blind spots we are all prone to in different ways.
And we are very aware that our identities and experiences have - and continue to influence our assumptions and ways of viewing and experiencing the world.
We are also aware that whilst we are all actively involved in international movements and conversations, our perspective on the marginalisation of the inner dimension derives primarily from our experiences in the UK.
This will change as we internationalise our team.
Whilst we are all able-bodied, team members have experience of living with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and long-term chronic illness and the debilitating impact this can have, as well as the insights and transformation that arise from living with, healing and transforming such conditions.
And whilst we are all white, one of our team members has experience of recent ancestral histories of migration, and what it is to be the first one in this lineage to heal and transform the epigenetic and intergenerational trauma that has been inherited in relation to this recent history of migration, involving being both oppressed and oppressor.
We mention all this because becoming allies to all that and those which are marginalised is so core to our approach to inner-led change. The suffering, and transformation resulting from our own personal journeys around marginalisation and psychological liberation lie at the heart of what fuels our solidarity and commitment to radical inclusivity and the deep cultural transformation it unleashes.
You can find out more about each of Starter Culture's co- founders here:
Starter Culture family
Our Starter Culture family includes dear friends and cherished collaborators from a range of different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. They each support and contribute to Starter Culture in their own unique way and add different and very valuable perspectives that help stretch and expand the ground from which our work emerges.
You can get a taste of some of the members of our Starter Culture family here:
Growing our family
Whilst we are all working to dismantle colonialism and systems of oppression from the inside out, we also acknowledge that the resilience and wisdom needed for these times will only come from a broad diversity of perspectives and experiences. We are committed to diversifying our core team and wider family, so that we are better placed to centre and amplify marginalised voices, and to co-create a working culture that supports healthy relating, both within the team and through our collaborations.
