founder, extreme hangout

Driven by a lifelong passion for wildlife, the outdoors and adventure Amber extracts stories, highlights game changing people and projects and celebrates grassroots organisations and true business leaders through the creation of the environmental platform the Extreme Hangout. A passionate, gutsy and dedicated voice bringing her community and communication skills together to highlight a bold a beautiful future.

Amber is a great convener, challenger and seeker of truth she’s not afraid to shake up the conversation, seek out trailblazers and showcase grand visions as she is a big believer in highlighting dream scenarios to act as guiding principles for us all to go forth and create together the 2050 of our dreams, not our nightmares. With years of communications, marketing and business development skills, entrepreneurial flare and someone who credits years in the service industry as having delivered her work ethic she is very much a lady on a mission.

Anushka Fernando was born and raised in Sri Lanka and now lives in Chichester, West Sussex. Drawing on her own experience as a busy mother keen on wholesome and natural food for her growing young children and combining her interest in art and beauty, she is on a mission to share her personal story of how she combined art and beauty with food and healthy living for the mind and body. She has spoken and written to global audiences on “serving love and art on a dinner plate: discovering art and wellbeing in the kitchen”.

Anushka has written curriculum on socio-emotional learning skills and serves on the board of Learn for Life Lanka which teaches socio-emotional learning skills to disadvantaged adolescents.  Her educational background includes a Master of Education from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with honors in sociology from Mount Holyoke College

Anushka shares content on food art, both her own original work and that of others on her Instagram account @stories_of_a_mama

She is open  to collaborating with brands and companies that have similar values to her- appreciating beauty and art, wholesome food, showing kindness to self, others and to the planet

I love working with children and young people and I’ve worked in education for 15 years. I am now training to be an educational psychologist and have an interest in preventative psychological work in Early Years. I’m fascinated in the interaction between the gut microbiome and mental health and I hope to explore ways in which multi-agency approaches may provide better holistic support for our children and young people.

Children’s Food Campaign

Barbara leads the Children’s Food Campaign at Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming. This brings together over 80 different health, education, children’s and parenting organisations to champion children’s rights, parent power and government action to improve the food environment children grow up in. The campaign seeks to make healthy, nutritious and sustainably sourced food the easy, affordable and appealing option for all families. Campaign successes include winning government regulation to introduce the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, in-store restrictions on unhealthy food at entrances and checkouts, universal infant school meals and better school food standards and a 9pm watershed on junk food advertising.  Current campaigns include Recipe for Change, calling for more incentives for healthier food industry, and Say Yes to School Food For All.

Barbara has over 30 years’ experience of policy, advocacy and campaigning in the not-for-profit sector, working on children’s rights, international food and trade, public health and social justice, spanning Fairtrade, Save the Children and the international development charity CAFOD. Barbara is also the founder of Out for Change, her executive coaching and campaigns and public affairs consultancy, specialising in food systems, sustainability, ethical trade and social justice. Outside of work she is an avid foodie, birdwatcher, bookworm, traveller and indie choir member.

Lactation Consultant, The World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative

WBTi is a collaborative initiative to assess and monitor key breastfeeding policies and programmes (WBTi indicators), all drawn from the WHO Global Strategy and the Innocenti Declaration. It was launched by the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) in 2004.

The first WBTi UK report was launched in Parliament on 15 November 2016.  https://ukbreastfeeding.org  see UK Team here.  Currently over 100 countries are participating in the WBTi; the latest global report and details are available online, including the European 18-country report 2020.  Each report lists gaps and recommendations for each indicator to trigger “Actions” that improve support for breastfeeding in that country.

Mothers and babies need the full network of support that is measured by the WBTi.

Follow the news and discussion on Twitter @wbtiUK and on our Facebook page.

Elaine began her career in the field of psychology. Her interest in complementary therapies lead to subsequent studies in osteopathy, naturopathy and acupuncture. Following her interest in acupuncture Elaine spent time working in hospitals in China.

Elaine is interested in many aspects of health and well-being. She has combined her time working in the Health Spa environment and hospitals. Her focus is on health promotion and designing wellness programmes for spas, notably The Gut Health Programme for Grayshott spa.

Additionally, Elaine has spent time working in paediatrics at the charity The Osteopathic Cente For Children . A particular interest was tongue tie as an impediment to breastfeeding.

author

Author of The Politics of Breastfeeding, Gabrielle Palmer has been involved for more than 40 years in international efforts to stop the unethical promotion of breastmilk substitutes globally and also to support appropriate infant feeding.

Palmer resolved to work against the unethical promotion of artificial milks over breastfeeding. She was instrumental in establishing the campaigning group Baby Milk Action based in Cambridge, UK, and of which she is still a patron. This work with Baby Milk Action included coordinating the UK boycott of Nestle products.

In 1988, Palmer’s first book, The Politics of Breastfeeding proved influential and became required reading on courses for midwives and others.

She remained busy with campaigning, designing training courses, teaching, consultancies and writing. From 1991 to 1997 Palmer was co-director of the international short course, Breastfeeding: practice and policy at the Institute of Child Health, London. She has worked and run short training courses for health professionals in over 30 countries including Mongolia, Libya and North Korea, and in 1999, she was appointed HIV and Infant Feeding Officer in UNICEF HQ, New York. From  2001 to 2007 she interleaved this work with part time teaching in the Public Health Nutrition Department at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Co-Founder, The Gut Stuff

Prior to founding The Gut Stuff, as The Mac Twins, with her identical twin sister they’d done everything from DJing at the Olympics, to presenting on the Brits red carpet, regular live radio shows for BBC 1xtra and Virgin Radio, creating their own DJ gaming live battle show and being the Official Love Island DJ’s, but they can now add business women to that list and The Gut Stuff is their proudest venture to date.

The Gut Stuff was built to democratise gut health and now has a highly successful snacking range, a corporate wellness services business, 3 books, a consumer focused gut health app and even their very own (now global) tv show “Know your sh!t”.

Toni Harman is a filmmaker, author, course creator, international speaker and champion of the microbiome.

Toni has produced and directed a number of award-winning documentary films including MICROBIRTH – about the origins of the human microbiome. MICROBIRTH has won many international film festivals and been broadcast internationally, plus has had over 1,000 public screenings worldwide.

Toni’s extensive research for MICROBIRTH led to her authoring the books THE MICROBIRTH EFFECT and YOUR BABY’s MICROBIOME.

Toni has created an online school offering accredited courses about the infant microbiome, now with over 42,000 students.

In addition, Toni has hosted two international virtual conferences. The last conference held in February 2024 was attended by over 3,500 health professionals from around the world.

Toni is currently working on a global campaign to bring awareness of the infant microbiome to parents, particularly why vaginal birth (when possible), skin-to-skin and support for exclusive breastfeeding are all so important for the optimal development of the infant microbiome, to benefit the future health of the next generation.

MICROBIRTH Global Campaign 2025 – Expression Of Interest

We are creating a global grass-roots impact campaign spearheaded by the Spring 2025 launch of our new feature-length documentary (ANNOUNCED VERY SOON). Our mission is to bring an understanding of the infant microbiome to parents and to health professionals, to potentially transform the health of the next generation. Our goal is to have 10,000 film premieres happening on the same day around the world, hosted in local communities, by people like YOU. If we can do this, we can reach up to one million parents in one day! And that’s just the start…

Express your Interest

We would love YOU to be involved. You could host a movie premiere in your local area, or simply attend a screening. Or you might have connections or ideas that can help us reach more people to create an even bigger impact. In effect, we are building a global ecosystem of people who want to be part of this global campaign in some way. If you fill in this form, we will contact you with further details in due course. No obligation. No commitment. This is simply a “Yes” I’m interested to find out more!

https://bit.ly/RegisterMICROBIRTH

More about Toni’s work can be found at:

microbirth.com
microbiomecourses.com