Meet Our Team
Jo Buick
FOUNDER & DIRECTOR
Jo (she/her) is an educator and somatics practitioner of Scottish Highlands ancestry, born on Bunurong country and currently living on Wurundjeri country. In her role as the Director of Collective Being, Jo ensures that the organisation engages in purpose-aligned work, secures sustainable funding, delivers programs that meet community needs, and operates with rigour, joy and tenderness, both internally and externally.
Jo worked across the social justice sector for over 15 years as an educator and strategist. She has designed, facilitated and managed diverse educational programs for children and youth, people from refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds, people experiencing mental health challenges, survivors of trauma and family violence, and staff experiencing burnout. She has also designed and facilitated state and nation-wide train-the-trainer and change management programs within the non-profit sector.
With an interest in holistic and community-embedded approaches to wellbeing, Jo has also trained in somatic, trauma-informed, and mental health aware frameworks. She holds Masters degrees in both Teaching and Education, and has engaged in over 1000 hours of training in yoga, Ayurveda, mindfulness and pranayama. She is trained in the empirically validated Trauma Centre Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) method and IRest protocols, and is a Somatic Experiencing (SE) Practitioner in training.
Prior to launching Collective Being, Jo taught trauma-sensitive yoga and mindfulness in clinical and complex settings. She was also a lead teacher on the Yoga for HUmanKIND trauma-informed trainings nationally and internationally for four years.
Collective Being is where all of these diverse yet interconnected experiences come together. For Jo, Collective Being is a source of solace, joy, and infinite possibility, and she is honoured to engage in daily acts of co-creation, generative processing, and wild dreaming with fellow team members, program participants and community partners.