Training and Speaking

Academic Research, Professional Practice and Lived Experience

Dr Lisa Cherry has been delivering training and speaking at conferences internationally for over 16 years having previously worked across Children’s Services and Education.

Most trauma-informed training raises awareness and stops there. Staff leave understanding more about trauma and no clearer about what to do differently on a Tuesday morning. Lisa's training is built to close that gap. It is grounded in the Belonging, Mattering and Liminality framework, developed through her doctoral research at Oxford and published as Weaving a Web of Belonging, and it draws on established thinking about mattering, attachment, the nervous system and organisational trauma, translated into language and tools that practitioners actually use.

She has delivered training and keynotes to thousands of practitioners, leaders and carers across the UK and internationally, and she brings her own story of care experience into the room without turning training into memoir. That combination, academic rigour, practice knowledge and lived experience, is what organisations say changes the tone of the room. It also means she can meet a group where they are, whether that is a headteacher's staff meeting, a probation team under pressure, or a social work service trying to hold its own people as well as the families it serves.

The Belonging, Mattering and Liminality framework

This is the heart of everything Lisa teaches. BML gives organisations a shared, practical language for what is too often left to instinct: why some people feel they belong and others do not, why mattering is not the same as being included, and how liminal moments, transition, uncertainty, change, are where belonging is won or lost. Training built around BML moves a staff group from 'we know trauma affects behaviour' to a working method, mapping where belonging breaks down in their own systems and building the conditions that hold it in place.

Sessions can include practical exercises such as the Village activity and the map of belonging, worked through with case studies built for the sector in the room. Organisations can take this as a single introductory session or build toward a fuller training programme, with workbooks and facilitator materials so their own staff can carry the work on internally.

Trauma-informed and trauma-shaped practice

Lisa works with organisations that want to move beyond a trauma-informed policy statement and become, in practice, a trauma-shaped organisation, one where the way meetings run, decisions get made and people are managed reflects what we know about trauma and the nervous system. Her full-day programme, Working in a trauma-shaped organisation, takes a staff group through four connected movements, from understanding trauma responses to redesigning the everyday conditions of the workplace itself.

She also trains specifically on vicarious trauma and burnout for teams carrying other people's pain daily, on trauma-informed language and writing for practitioners producing reports and case notes, and on compassion-focused practice for people working in criminal justice settings, where compassion is too often treated as a risk rather than a skill.

Collective and self care

Wellbeing training too often lands as an individual responsibility: breathe, rest, set a boundary, and the system carries on regardless. Lisa takes a different position. Collective care treats wellbeing as something a team and an organisation build together, not something each person is left to manage alone after a hard day. Her keynotes and sessions on this theme draw on Conversations that Make a Difference for Practitioners, and cover collective grief, intergenerational trauma where it is relevant to the setting, and practical ways teams can hold each other through difficult work rather than absorbing it individually.

This work suits frontline and leadership teams in education, social care, criminal justice, and voluntary and community organisations, wherever staff are carrying trauma that is not their own.

Built for your sector, not generic

Every session Lisa delivers is adapted to the room she is walking into. In education, that means working with headteachers, multi-academy trusts and SENCOs on exclusion, belonging and the conditions that keep children in school. In children's social care, it means case studies and language drawn from social work and residential and foster care practice. In criminal justice and probation, it means composite case studies built specifically for that context and a direct address of how compassion and belonging sit alongside risk and accountability. Where an organisation sits across more than one of these worlds, or works with a particular community, she builds the content around the client's group rather than handing over a fixed deck.

Formats and delivery

Training can run as a keynote or conference session, typically ninety minutes, a half day focused on a single theme, or a full day working through a complete programme. For organisations wanting deeper, sustained change, Lisa also builds bespoke whole-organisation programmes, delivered over several sessions, with workbooks, facilitator guides and materials staff can use to embed the work after she has gone. Every format starts with a conversation about what the organisation needs, not a fixed menu.

Book training for your organisation

Organisations that want their teams thinking and working differently about belonging, mattering and trauma-informed practice can get in touch and share their sector and what they are hoping training will change. Lisa will respond with a proposal shaped around that conversation, not a standard package pulled off a shelf.

Contact lisa@lisacherry.co.uk to learn more