About us
We believe that healing happens in relationship, in the body, and in community. We do not offer quick fixes or productivity hacks. We offer something slower and more lasting: permission to be seen, and to be whole.
Our founder, Katy Massey, brings two decades of experience across child protection, international development, trauma-informed education, and perinatal care. The Joyful Activists was not built from a business plan — it was built from lived experience of what happens when people do not have somewhere to be honest about the impact of their activism on mental, physical and spiritual health.
This community is where we're co-creating that space, with and for each other.
Our Mission
Our Values
Our Vision
The work doesn't stop. But you need somewhere to land — somewhere with rest, joy and community. We create trauma-informed spaces for people who care about the world.
A world which prioritises the wellbeing of activists, so activists can continue prioritising the wellbeing of the world.
🌞 Creativity
🌞 Collaboration
🌞 Community
🌞 Courage
🌞 Care
The origins of joy in activism
Our understanding of wellbeing is inseparable from the structures that shape it. Capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy do not simply create the conditions our communities are fighting against; they also determine who is permitted to rest, who is expected to keep going regardless, and whose exhaustion is rendered invisible. The burnout epidemic in the charity and humanitarian sectors is not a personal failing. It is a structural one, produced by systems that extract labour — and particularly the labour of women, of racialised communities, of those at the sharpest end of inequality, while offering little in return. To talk about wellbeing without naming this is to offer a sticking plaster over a wound that requires something far more radical.
We are guided here by the scholarship and lived wisdom of Black women writers and thinkers who have long centred rest and joy as acts of resistance, and whose work is not peripheral to the conversation about activist wellbeing, but foundational to it. Tricia Hersey's Nap Ministry reframes rest not as laziness but as reparation, a direct refusal of the grind culture that capitalism and white supremacy built together. Audre Lorde named self-care as self-preservation and political warfare long before wellness became an industry. adrienne maree brown's work on pleasure activism insists that the things that make us feel good are also how we practise justice; that joy is not a distraction from the work, but its very texture. bell hooks wrote unflinchingly about love as a transformative political force. Sonya Renee Taylor's radical self-love framework asks us to understand our bodies not as problems to be managed, but as sites of liberation.
The Joyful Activists is committed to holding these foundations honestly, acknowledging that rest, joy, and pleasure have never been equally accessible, and that any wellbeing practice must reckon with why.
Why do activists need wellbeing support?
1 in 23 people globally needs humanitarian assistance and protection.
The demand on charity and humanitarian organisations is monumental.
When our job requires us to support with traumatic, upsetting and emotive situations, our own challenges can feel irrelevant in comparison. This means we often diminish or ignore our own mental health concerns.
94%
of charity workers in the UK say they feel stress, overwhelm & burnout
(Third Sector, 2021)
52%
of UK charities want the government to do more to support mental health
(Onepoll, 2021)
93%
of humanitarian workers who experience mental health conditions attribute it to their jobs
(Global Development Professionals Network, 2015)
44%
of charity leaders have considered quitting due to burnout
(Onepoll, 2021)
These are not personal failures.
They are the predictable result of a sector that has not yet built the infrastructure to sustain the people it depends on.
Our Approach
At The Joyful Activists, we know that to create lasting change in the world, we need to start by taking care of ourselves. Personal wellbeing isn’t a luxury - it’s essential if we’re going to sustain our efforts to challenge injustice and build more compassionate systems. That’s why our approach weaves together three strands - individual, organisational, and systemic - because nurturing ourselves gives us the strength and resilience to make an impact far beyond ourselves.
Individual
We support you to care for your individual wellbeing and create space in your life for rest, play and connection. We offer somatic workshops, 1:1 support, and community circles to nurture genuine resilience and restore your capacity for joy.
Organisational
We support organisations to build cultures where care, connection, and purpose come first. We know that thriving teams are grounded in both individual and collective wellbeing. We love to co-create workshops spaces to explore what wellbeing means in your workplace, so your team can feel valued, heard, and supported.
Systemic
True transformation requires challenging and reshaping the systems that perpetuate inequality and injustice. We work collaboratively — through advocacy, partnerships, and research — to build policies, practices, and movements that centre joy and justice. By amplifying community voices and centring lived experience, we strive for systemic change that uplifts everyone, including the people driving it.
Our Principles
Research-led
Our founder Katy holds an MA (with Distinction) in Education, Gender and International Development, with a focus on peace and conflict, Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and Education in Emergencies (EiE). All of our workshops are underpinned and inspired by academic research and lived experience on wellbeing, community-based mental health support, and psychological safety.
Trauma-informed
Katy is a trauma-informed practitioner, holding qualifications in Thrive (neuroscience, child development & attachment theory), mediation skills for homelessness prevention, Trauma-Informed Doula Education (birth and postnatal), Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Perinatal Mental Health, Child Protection and Advanced Safeguarding, Psychological First Aid, Mindfulness in Schools, Human Rights, Playwork & Early Years, and Teaching in Post-Compulsory Education.
She has worked therapeutically with pregnant women and birthing people, children, adolescents and their families experiencing domestic abuse, human trafficking, exploitation, homelessness, modern slavery, FGM, incarceration and displacement.
Decolonial & anti-racist
We are committed to collaborating with activists and organisations to decolonise the humanitarian and aid sector, and challenge and dismantle the roots of racist and patriarchal systems that cause inequality and significant psychological distress. Our work endeavours to uphold anti-racist practice at all times. We actively welcome constructive feedback if you see areas of development in our work.
A note on safe spaces
No group, workshop or organisation can promise a 'safe space.'
Safety is personal. It's shaped by our identities, our histories, the bodies we move through the world in. What feels freeing to one person can feel exposing or harmful to another.
What we believe in instead is co-creating safer conditions; an ongoing, collective practice, not a box we've already ticked.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
We check sign-ups. We review who's joining our events and spaces to check for any unknown email adddresses.
We open our virtual spaces with shared intentions. Every gathering begins by naming how we want to be together.
We reserve the right to remove anyone from our mailing list or spaces who causes harm.
We are clear about where we stand. The Joyful Activists is proudly and explicitly pro-LGBTQ+, and actively anti-racist.
