Location: Worcestershire, England
Areas of Expertise: Education on the emergence of human consciousness, utilising leading research from Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics. Personal coaching and organisational assessment using the same models. This includes psychometric organisational assessment in line with the influential work of Reinventing Organisations from Frederic Laloux.
Jonathan also has extensive experience of guiding the formation of social enterprise ‘Care Farms’ that use farms and normal farming practices as the foundation to provide innovative social care for various groups of vulnerable people. He led the development of a network of over 40 new Care Farms in England’s West Midlands, including business planning, marketing, promotion and large scale fundraising. He provides webinars and presentations to introduce the concept and can guide the development journey to those that are interested.
Affiliations: Certified Professional Coach with Integral Coaching Canada. Spiral Dynamics Assessment Practitioner with Value Match (Netherlands). Member of Sustainability West Midlands.
Services: Personal and organisational coaching and values assessment. Education sessions on the subjects of integral theory, spiral dynamics and care farming. Development of new care farm services including advice on business planning, marketing and start-up process.
Bio: Jonathan spent the early part of his career working his way up to General Manager and Head Buyer for a large designer fashion store in the city centre of Birmingham. Over time, he began to question his lifestyle and a friend suggested he take a holiday at the transformational learning centre of the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. This proved to be life changing. After a relatively brief immersion in this community and their small farming unit, a much improved version of himself somehow appeared. Jonathan had absolutely no understanding about how this had actually happened but knew he wanted to find out.
Upon leaving Findhorn he decided to retrain, achieving a distinction at Master’s level in Sustainable Development Advocacy. Jonathan wrote his dissertation on the relationship between disease and transformation of human consciousness and was introduced to the work of Ken Wilber and integral theory for the first time by his Professor and her colleagues. He found the theory so powerful in answering deep questions he had about the personal journey so far and committed to learning more.
Following his masters, Jonathan went on to hold a central role in the initial development of care farming in the UK, setting up farm based social enterprises to provide support to various groups of vulnerable people – from those suffering from alcohol, drug or mental health problems right through to those excluded from school and people with learning disabilities. He provided business planning and marketing advice to the start-up care farms and raised over £600k for a new organisation to provide strategic support and networking.
Providing the go-between between social services and the farming community and with over 40 social enterprises in active development, the intensity of life conditions caused another and much broader worldview to be viscerally activated within him. Recognising how crucial integral theory and spiral dynamics had been in supporting his own growth, he then moved into training to deliver this in practical and helpful ways for other people and organisations.