Our Team
Leonie Smith
For many years I struggled to find ways of working in cultures that I found challenging. Their toxicity and approaches to work were disempowering, ineffective, and demoralizing. I counted myself among the working wounded. So much of my life was designed around dealing with the stresses of work.
Tired of being tired, I searched for a more principled approach to working. Along the way I learned about nonviolence, nonviolent communication, and sociocracy. Learning about these different modalities and integrating them into my own principled way of living, I changed my relationship to work and life.
I created The Thoughtful Workplace specifically to share with leaders, regardless of where they are in the organization, a way of integrating principles of mutuality and respect in the day to day life of organizations.
Samuel Odhiambo is a Nonviolent Communication trainer and mediator certified by the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) and Mediation Training Institute Eastern Africa (MTI).
He grew up in Mukuru; an informal settlement in Nairobi where he developed a passion for social change especially co-creating structures in which eye-level collaboration spurs socio-economic development, he focuses on enhancing connection amongst individuals balancing care for self and others through needs and feelings consciousness.
He is a board member of Tuzungumze Amani foundation, Peace Ambassadors Kenya and Baba Tree International. He was a co-organizer of the 2017 Kenyan International Intensive Training, and a trainer at the International Intensive Trainings in Austria 2018 and Argentina in 2019 respectively.
