Throughout July and August FD Consultants want to highlight the diverse expertise and professionalism amongst its associates. This week, Yasmin Dunkley, Business Development Strategist, writes about her expertise and experience of working with FD Consultants. Yasmin Dunkley is a public health consultant, who specialises in the field of HIV and sexual health, with more recent experience delivering strategic support to community-based organisations and research universities around COVID19. Yasmin joined FD Consultants as a Business Development Strategist in 2019 and has supported the organisation ever since. I have watched Fiona grow FD Consultants global consultancy from the beginning; she has grown it from an idea to support the mental health of the carers of our world, to an international advocacy organisation, that agitates for, and delivers, high quality, trauma informed, equitable mental health support for humanitarian employees and volunteers. I have worked with Fiona to support FD Consultant’s growth and ambitions; to diversify the service offer, and to demonstrate to funders the high-quality work that we offer. I have worked with Fiona directly on research projects to map best practice mental health crisis support across the world. We have delivered case reports and drawn best practice learnings when staff and volunteers on deployment have experienced mental health crisis. We have compiled summary reports of best practice mental health support for nationally recruited staff and challenged the harmful narratives that locally recruited staff do not need the same degree of mental health support as international colleagues. Given space to reflect since the COVID19 lockdown began, I have been able to work out what it is I want to achieve professionally and personally in the short time that we have on this planet. Fiona’s example of setting up a successful consultancy, dedicated to a clear mission of improving mental health outcomes for individuals, has supported me in distilling my own ambitions. I have been delivering HIV prevention services for the last decade, both in the UK, with an incredible charity in the east of London, Positive East, where I manage the prevention service, to stints in west Africa, delivering capacity building for healthcare professionals. I am now based in South Africa, supervising a COVID19 internship for refugee and migrant students at the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town. I have seen first-hand the discrepancy in health service access and information access between resource rich settings, and low- and middle-income countries, and I am dedicated to working to address that knowledge divide, through my own training programme for professionals. The recent Black Lives Matter protests highlighted to much of the world a well-known fact in public health circles, that structural racism, and the wider social determinants of health, limit individuals from living full and healthy lives. Poor mental health, vulnerability to HIV, or even COVID19 are the direct outcomes of these structural barriers. In my own small way, through delivering training to enable information access to professionals across the African continent, the outcome of these structural barriers are the areas that I am working to change. More subtly, working with FD Consultants has given me space to be compassionate to myself, and to reflect critically on good self-care. I am an over-achiever, never satisfied until I have delivered work of the highest level and quality. I do not like to disappoint, and often that has meant that I will say “Yes” to projects or consultancies that do not quite align with my own principles. Given the space to reflect during the COVID19 lockdown, and the influence from FD Consultants, including the incredible RESPECT toolkit designed by Fiona Dunkley (2018), I have felt able to give myself permission to say “No” and take time for myself. If you are an organisation or individual, who wants to take some time being kind to yourself or employees, you could do no better than have a conversation with FD Consultants today. Please do contact us at [email protected] if you require our psychological support services. For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace. FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.
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