Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and Ibe your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehapen.couk. That's S-E-E Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 87 with the title Rebel Hearts and Healing Paths.

And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Debbie Dannon. Debbie describes herself as a leadership coach, facilitator and rebel. When I asked Debbie to describe her superpower, she said, taking pain and transforming it through healing and liberation into love both her own and others. Hello, Debbie. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. It's so good to be here with you.

It's brilliant. I mean, we've known each other now four or five years, ever since we did a design for inclusion with Fearless Futures. Oh, that was a long time ago. Way before COVID Way before COVID You.

Are definitely one of the trainees that I remember. I remember we connected quite deeply there and I was so delighted to reconnect with you through LinkedIn in more recent times, as we're both striving for similar things in the world. So I'm really, really glad that we not only met but also reconnected.

Yeah. And I've been kind of secretly a bit of a fangirl of yours ever since. So, yeah, I was really inspired by that session.

Mutual fangirling is about to occur.

I can handle it. I can handle it. Can the audience? I don't know. So, Debbie debbie, tell me. Rebel hearts and healing paths. Tell me about yourself.

Wow, I love this introduction. It's really speaking to who I think I'm becoming in the world and who I'm inviting my clients and my co conspirators to become as well. So, my name is Debbie. My pronouns are she, her. I was born in South London, but I live in North London. I do believe you can be both. People are very binary about these things. But I'm first generation in this country.

My parents came from Istanbul in Turkey as Turkish Jews. So kind of minority within a minority living in a kind of predominantly white Christian or white atheist community in South London. So ever since I was really little, I found myself having to explain things about why we didn't have a Christmas tree. And people asking, do you speak Jewish at home or Turkish with your family? And you're like, I'm like, Well, Jewish is our religion and Turkish is the language, these sorts of things, where even from a very young age, I found myself in a kind of explanatory role. So maybe it's not surprising, the kind of career path that I've taken from there. I have always been fascinated in religion and identity and I guess what has people act as they do? I guess what has people act in ways that are compassionate and loving and affirming and kind of almost selfless, or, I guess, generous in those ways and then also ways in which human hearts can kind of close and we can become, by the same token, closed off. We can become judgmental, we can become disconnected, we can do harm to each other. And I've always been interested in that, but through different lenses.

So I studied theology and religious studies at university and philosophy. I was at the same time super active in a Jewish youth group where I learned a lot of the leadership skills. And the facilitation that I do has its roots really in a lot of that theory and that practise of youth work. Very trying to be very democratic, trying to kind of remove a lot of the power dynamics that exist in formal education settings, making it possible for different people to participate, removing barriers. And then my career has kind of had different chapters to it. So I worked initially in the interfaith space. So I was one of the co founders of an interfaith organisation. It was at the time called Three Faith Forum.