Kirsten Harris

Kirsten Harris Counselling - 2023 -

• private practice where I focus on Trauma counselling, LGBTQIA+, Gender and Identity counselling.
• I also offer General counselling and Life Skills coaching.
• Guiding clients in developing skills and strategies for dealing with problems.
• Improving client satisfaction through consistent communication, empathy, and understanding of their unique challenges.

• I first worked as a (volunteer) student registered counsellor, and then a professional registered counsellor, on the MOBIEG platform.
• This is an online, text-based platform which offers a variety of services, one of which is free counselling.
• My role on this platform was to offer support and assistance to any client that I engaged with
• The platform offered counselling in a wide variety of different areas; essentially offering services for any issue that someone may be struggling with in their life.
• Due to the nature of this service I gained experience in many different areas:

- Trauma counselling including(gender-based violence, self-harm, LGBTQIA+, DID [not treating the disorder, only offering support].

- General counselling including workplace troubles, self-esteem, managing conflict and confrontation, university concerns - isolation, career confusion, relationships.

• I worked as a student trauma counsellor, based at the Bramley police station
• In this position, one of my roles was to contact individuals who had been victims of contact crimes and offer them counselling sessions
• Along with the other counsellors, I was also responsible for providing counselling sessions to those individuals who did come in
• We worked with cases of rape, domestic violence, intimidation, robbery, and assault, amongst others
• Furthermore, to date, I have attended seven Capacity Building Sessions on different aspects relating to Trafficking in Persons, hosted by the National Freedom Network.

• In this workshop, the participants were shown various design-thinking tools and techniques (rather than the design-thinking process) to help them think and conceptualise innovative, clear structures which may aid in co-ordinating gender-based violence activities
• The motivation for this was that the current structures have been ineffective; the ideas that are proposed are simply more of the same
• As one of the facilitators, it was my responsibility to ensure that my teams had the best and most productive experience possible
• This included ensuring that each ‘activity’ was understood and engaged in fully
• As the tools and techniques used in design-thinking are highly creative, allowing for simple ideas to be transformed into tangible concepts, some of the participants felt that it was childish to be conceptualising structures using ‘arts and crafts’ and Lego
• This experience was challenging in asking people to trust the process and try something different
• However, despite some resistance, the workshop was a success; participants were able to create incredibly diverse and innovative concepts.

• The workshop was conducted around the challenge of “redesigning the coordination of government and civil society’s approach to GBV.” The participants were made up of women from various government departments and civil society organisations
• The workshop entailed introducing the women to the design-thinking process
• My role was to guide each team through the process, as well as assisting teams in engaging fully, listening to each other, considering everyone’s viewpoints and ideas, and working as a team.

• As a coach at the school of design thinking, my roles and responsibilities varied
• For the Foundation Programme, my role and responsibilities included guiding a team of students in the design thinking process
• Facilitating and encouraging a dynamic, diverse team space for students to engage fully in the process of design thinking
• Creating and maintaining a safe space in which each individual has the ability to express themselves and their ideas without judgement.
• Encouraged everyone to cultivate strong work ethic by demonstrating diligence, patience, and respect for others

• As a research assistant to a former lecturer, Ms George Barrett, my duties included editing her PhD thesis, referencing and research; as well as assisting in marking post-graduate research papers.

• During my time with the Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM: A community activism organisation) I was involved in various forms of support work which included organising events, protests, and marches, as well as being involved in the continuous processes of different agendas within the movement.