Brackish - S6 E13: Kerry Tottingham & How to spot a tomboy, all grown up

Brackish (formerly Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden)

In this episode, Katie speaks with Kerry Tottingham, a social change designer and Strategic Lead of A Brilliant Thing CIC. Kerry’s work sits at the intersection of healing, systems change and creativity, and through her framework Healing-Centred Design®, she helps leaders and organisations transform adversity into energy, action and impact.

“Hope isn’t an emotion. It’s an everyday action.” - Kerry Tottingham

In this conversation, Kerry shares her personal and professional journey, from working in egg mayonnaise factories and funding bid writing to co-founding a business with her sisters and how all of it led to the creation of work that is rooted in community, joy and transformation.

What unfolds is a rich, honest and deeply human exploration of how we keep going when things feel hard, why creativity is a powerful force in social justice, and how we build structures that truly support wellbeing, not just perform it.

We cover:

- Kerry’s unconventional route to founding A Brilliant Thing CIC with her sisters

- How the Healing-Centred Design® methodology works and why it matters

- The shift from seeing hope as passive to practicing it as an active daily choice

- What it means to move from pain to power, both personally and collectively

- The role of sensory experiences, creativity and joy in designing systemic change

- Why saying “not this” is a great place to start but not where we should stop

- How Kerry’s team challenges conventional working norms

- A look at her new book: Healing-Centred Transformation (June 2025)

This episode is a beautiful reminder that healing and hope aren’t things we wait for, they’re things we build, bit by bit, through the choices we make every day.

Whether you’re designing a programme, leading a team, navigating chronic illness, or simply trying to find your way through a difficult season, Kerry’s work offers a grounded, creative, and deeply human approach to doing it differently.

More from Kerry:

Website: https://brilliantthing.co.uk/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrytottingham/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abrilliantthing/

More from Katie:

Instagram: @katietreggiden.1

Website: https://katietreggiden.com/

Blue Health Coaching: https://makingdesigncircular.org/coaching

Nature-inspired poetry: https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/poetry

Resources mentioned:

Healing-Centred Transformation by Kerry Tottingham (This is an affiliate link)

The Brilliant Club – a learning space and coaching programme for leaders living with chronic conditions

The Brilliant Box – a deck of coaching cards for reflection, group development and values-led strategy

Brilliant Thing, Desire Paths - Create desire paths to get work done (and meet our needs)

Invisibilia (podcast) – Unseeable forces control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. Invisibilia—Latin for invisible things—fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently.

Out of the Box project by Special Projects

Brackish - S6 E9: Sas Petherick & Blackout Poem #5

Check out my full Bookshop.org podcast reading list to find links to all the books mentioned throughout Season 6 of Brackish.

What next?

If all this talk of defiant hope has got you wondering where you can find some, I have something for you. Cultivating Hope is my three-part mini-course and it’s the three steps I move through whenever I start to feel despair tugging at my edges.

You will move out of ‘fight, flight or freeze’ mode and into a calm and connected state, reconnect with nature, and find aligned actions that you can take now to keep you to remind you that you can make a difference.

In the current climate, hope is an act of defiance, and it’s one I hope you’ll take with me.

Click here to find out more here

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