Host Deepa Thomas-Sutcliffe introduces the ninth episode of Season 12 of the Meet the Mancunian podcast and speaks with Kerry Tottingham, co-director of A Brilliant Thing, about supporting healthier, more sustainable work cultures in charities and purpose-led organisations. Kerry shares her route into Manchester’s social impact space through volunteering, arts work, charity management, and collaboration across the NHS and local authorities, and explains how health challenges and pandemic-era pressure led her to freelance and later build the social enterprise with her sisters.
She outlines A Brilliant Thing’s healing-centred design approach combining trauma-informed practice, systems thinking, and creative coaching—delivered through placemaking, the Brilliant Club, the Brilliant Workplace, and facilitation school. Kerry describes impact in Bolton, defines success as mindset and systems change that creates ripple effects, discusses burnout, funding insecurity, and the need for fair pay, and shares plans for annual events and national expansion.
Did you know:
· Charities are facing challenges of declining donations, a difficult funding landscape, increasing service demand and staffing recruitment and retention challenges.
· As many as 66% of organisations in the voluntary sector are concerned about employee exhaustion, burn out and mental strain.
· Reports estimates 940,000 charity workers have felt stressed, overwhelmed or burn out in the last year.
Key resource:
Time stamps of key moments in the podcast episode & transcript:
(00:56) Meet Kerry Tottingham
(01:46) Early roots in Manchester
(03:16) Founding A Brilliant Thing
(06:35) Healing centred services
(10:34) Defining success and ripples
(18:53) Challenges, hope and design it in
(24:34) Future plans
🎧Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or www.meetthemancunian.co.uk
#Manchester #SocialImpact #Podcast #SocialChange #Charity
I hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast episode. Please do check out my other podcast episodes for a bit of inspiration.
