Sophy Banks
@livelifewild

Sophy’s eclectic life has included time as a therapist, family constellator, radical footballer, community activist,  engineer, computer trainer, and more.

Sophy’s understanding of the importance of shared grief work started through attending workshops of Joanna Macy and Sobonfu Some and continued in more recent work with Maeve Gavin. Since 2013 she has been growing Grief tending in community to seed and spread the practices of tending grief together, through offering talks, workshops in many formats, and supporting facilitators of grief work in the Apprenticing programme and beyond.

She is deeply committed to creating healthy human culture at all levels of scale, and sees that shared practices to express and hear our grief is a fundamental part of what brings us to right relationship to ourselves and those around us. This work of surfacing, witnessing and making meaning of our pain is crucial to transforming the systems of harm that abound in our world – and creating healthy relationships with ourselves, other people, and the wider living systems of the planet. You can find out more about Sophy’s work on Healthy Human Culture here.

In 2006 as Transition Town Totnes was coming into being Sophy co-founded the “Heart and Soul” group, addressing the inner aspects of re-imagining and rebuilding resilient, local ways of living. When the movement spread across the industrialised world, she jointly set up Transition Training, and shared this positive, holistic model for creating a vibrant future with groups in four continents.

Sophy lives in Devon, where she grows fruit, vegetables and friendships, and can still just about get up the hills on her bike.