Wellbeing Festival 2026
What is a well-being event?
The Women’s Mental Health and Well-being event is a one-day festival that aims to foster awareness, inclusivity, and support for women’s mental health.
The well-being event includes interactive workshops, insightful panel discussions, networking opportunities and empowerment through sharing.
Interactive workshops
Hands-on sessions designed to build resilience, promote mindfulness, and increase women’s mental health awareness.
Expert speakers
Hear from leading women’s mental health and well-being experts as they explore topics such as workplace wellbeing, inclusive mental health policies, and overcoming stigma.
Networking
Throughout the day, and over a light lunch provided, attendees will have the opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals in women’s mental health and wellbeing.
This well-being event will be a safe and welcoming space where everyone’s voice matters. Attendees will have the opportunity to share their stories, learn from others, and feel truly heard in a mental health and wellbeing community that values empathy and understanding.
Why attend the Women's Mental Health and Wellbeing Festival?
The Women’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Festival is a motivating and inspiring all-day festival taking place on 18th June 2026 at Glow
in County Durham. Featuring expert speakers, interactive workshops, exhibitors, and a chance to network with like-minded mental health and well-being professionals.
The day will be a transformative wellbeing festival dedicated to
highlighting the unique mental health challenges that women face, and empowering the attendees with practical tools for growth and resilience.
If you are a professional working in women’s mental health, wellbeing, or healthcare, or have a personal interest in women’s mental health, you will be welcome at this inclusive wellbeing festival.
Your ticket price includes a light lunch, refreshments, parking and access to all speakers and exhibitors. Book before the 28th Feb to secure our early bird offer!
All profits are going to 4 local charities in the North East that work with women supporting their mental health and wellbeing.
Women's Mental Health and Wellbeing Festival Speakers, Exhibitors and Workshop Activities
Alexandra Turner
Alexandra Turner is the founder of Valkyrie Protect, offering
female-only personal safety courses designed to empower women and girls with confidence and real-world skills.
Driven by the belief that every female deserves to feel safe, Valkyrie Protect equips participants to navigate daily life and unexpected situations with readiness and self-assurance.
Led by womenfor women, the courses create a supportive, empowering environment where participants can learn, share experiences, and build strength together regardless of age or physical capability or strength.
Folake Balogun
Folake Balogun is a mentor, author, and former co owner of a video production company that produced work for icons like Selena Gomez, Joan Collins, and global brands including MTV and the BBC. After experiencing and recovering from burnout herself, she now guides women across the world to reclaim their energy, confidence, and inner power. Her bestselling book Big Energy: A Mystical Guide to Reclaiming Your Power blends modern insight with ancient wisdom, offering a fresh perspective on women’s wellbeing and energetic resilience.
Website: innerpowergame.co.uk
Lou Wilkie
Lou offers a compassionate, holistic approach to supporting
animals’ emotional and physical wellbeing. As a certified practitioner of The Trust Technique, she works with animal parents to gently calm anxious, fearful, or over-excited animals.
By teaching people how to reduce mental and emotional
tension in their animals, she helps address behavioural challenges, strengthen the human–animal bond, and support recovery from trauma.
Her services are suitable for all animals — from dogs &
horses to cats, birds, small animals and farm animals — both animals and their guardians can experience greater harmony and wellbeing. In addition, Lou provides gentle, energy-based healing to enhance emotional balance and support physical healing, for animals & humans alike.
Paula Light
I qualified as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist in 2014 and as a Master Practitioner in 2015, studying with the Quest Institute, in Regents University in London. I worked with a variety of clients but found more children and teenagers asking for support. So, I undertook training to work with and specially help younger
clients, through Ollie and His Super Powers.
I wanted to widen the support I was able to provide and undertook further training to help clients with PTSD and trauma. The AMDR course has helped me to work with clients to recover from traumatic experiences, including serious sexual
offences, physical and mental traumatic experiences.
Prior to becoming a therapist, I worked in an emergency service in London, spending time in an operational front-line role. I undertook promotion and worked in various leadership roles supporting staff and colleagues, managing working
relationships with external partners and providing a quality service to the public. Throughout this time, I saw first had the many issues and challenges people struggled with in life and assisted them wherever possible.
I draw on my experience of supporting people within their personal and professional lives, bringing my skill sets from both careers together. Problem solving, supporting and working with clients to identify the issues, tailoring solutions for them to achieve success and improve.
At the Women’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Festival, I will explore with you how to achieve better sleep.
Amanda Gardiner
Amanda is an experienced Life Coach, NLP Master Practitioner and wellbeing facilitator with over 20 years’ experience in senior leadership and
supporting people through change. Known for her calm, grounding presence, she creates safe, nurturing spaces where women can slow down, reset and reconnect with themselves.
Alongside her coaching work, Amanda runs group relaxation experiences incorporating guided hypnotherapy, deep relaxation and restorative
practices designed to calm the nervous system and support emotional wellbeing.
As a Temple Spa Lifestyle Consultant, she also weaves luxurious aromatherapy products into her sessions and delivers skincare and wellness experiences that honour self-care from the inside out.
Amanda’s work is rooted in compassion, empowerment and the belief that when women are supported holistically — mind, body and skin — they
don’t just cope, they thrive.
Lisa Unger
Lisa will join us to talk about –
Unlocking Your Lifeline:
A Guided Workshop to Discover the Root-Cause of Why You Eat the Way You Do. This is a practical, interactive workshop for anyone who feels stuck in a difficult relationship with food or their body and uses food to help regulate their emotions.
You will gently explore key life experiences, beliefs and patterns to better understand the emotional and psychological factors that may be influencing your eating habits.
By recognising the deeper patterns that shape your eating and self-perception, you can begin to respond to yourself with greater awareness, self-compassion and calmness.
Lisa Picken
The Menopause Menu with Lisa Picken
Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed? Discover simple nutrition and lifestyle strategies to ease menopause symptoms, boost your energy, and help you feel like yourself again - with practical tips you can start using straight away.
Lisa Picken is a Registered Nutritional Therapist
specialising in perimenopause and menopause.
Lisa helps women who feel tired, overwhelmed, and disconnected from their bodies - taking away the confusion around nutrition and hormones to give clear, simple strategies to balance hormones naturally - so they can feel energised, confident, and back in control of their health again.
Rie Pearson
Rie Pearson is from North Tyneside. She lives overlooking the sea and describes herself as Living on The Edge!
Rie is married, and has three children, all now adults.
Rie's career background is in policing. She was a
police officer for 27 years. She specialised in Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, working both front line and strategically.
Rie's book, "Be Kind. No Excuses" is a guide for
teenagers and parents to raise awareness of the red-flag behaviours that are a precursor to abuse in romantic relationships.
Her Mission is to help educate parents and teenagers to recognise the early signs of coercive control, so they can be better prepared to deal with it.
Rie and her colleague – Annalice - will be talking about life after domestic abuse.
Sam Naughton - Founder,
Cocoon & Jane Bamford – Founder, Taking Baby Steps
Pregnancy Loss, Anxiety and the
Need for Better Support
Sam Naughton and Jane Bamford explore the emotional realities of miscarriage and pregnancy after loss, and how compassionate care can better support women through these experiences
Sam Naughton is the founder of Cocoon, a fertility, pregnancy and women’s wellbeing clinic based in Harrogate. After experiencing pregnancy loss and navigating the anxiety of pregnancy after loss, Sam left her senior corporate career to create the kind of compassionate, human-centred support she felt was missing for many women. Cocoon brings together scans, midwifery care, therapy and holistic
wellbeing services to support individuals through fertility, pregnancy and early parenthood. Sam is a passionate advocate for proactive, accessible
healthcare and speaks on women’s health, pregnancy after loss, human-centred healthcare and building purpose-driven businesses that support women at every stage of life.
Jane Bamford is a therapist and perinatal emotional health specialist working with Cocoon, and founder of Taking Baby Steps. A qualified midwife with over 22 years’ experience in the NHS, Jane specialises in supporting individuals and families through fertility
challenges, miscarriage, pregnancy anxiety, birth trauma and the emotional complexities of the perinatal period. Her professional expertise is shaped by her own personal journey through IVF, adoption and family therapy, giving her a deeply empathetic understanding of the realities many parents face. Jane combines clinical knowledge with therapeutic practice to help people process trauma, rebuild confidence and feel supported through some of life’s most vulnerable moments.
Rachel Goddard
Rachel Goddard is a Relationship and Empowerment Coach, Firewalking Instructor, and founder of Ignite Love — a transformational programme for women who are ready to reconnect with themselves, reclaim their voice, and step into the love and life they truly deserve.
With over 25 years' experience as a strategic
communications consultant, Rachel
understands the personal pressures that come with success — and the deeper longing for meaning, connection, and balance that so many women quietly carry.
Her work bridges nervous system awareness, attachment healing, feminine energy and embodied transformation, including firewalking ceremonies in Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland.
In her talk, The People We Love: Relationships, Wellbeing and Reclaiming Your Voice, Rachel explores how our closest relationships shape
our mental health — and what becomes possible when we come home to ourselves.
At her stand, Rachel will be sharing her Love Fire
Archetype quiz — discover whether you're an Ice Queen, a Flame Keeper, a Wildfire, or Warm Embers, and learn how to ‘Awaken The Flame Within.’
Sandra Hope
Essential Thyme is owned and run by Sandra Hope since 2012 and offers a range of different massage therapies tailored and bespoke to you to help with pain in both the body and mind.
In 2019, Sandra opened her training academy and now offers 7 fully accredited training courses from beginners to therapists who are looking to become a
therapist or add to what they currently offer.
As well as the therapies Sandra has a love for Lego and Brickworks was formed. Using the power of Lego to help unlock creativity, communication, problem solving, teamwork and focusing on the
moment, giving you time to immerse into bring out your inner child and have fun playing with Lego.
Kay Crewsdon
Kay has spent her career doing one thing consistently: using her voice to start conversations that matter.
With a background in broadcasting, she knows how to connect with people, really connect. That skill has shaped everything she’s gone on to do, from building
communities to championing causes that often go unspoken.
She’s a driving force behind Elevate Networking, where she brings women together not just to network, but to actually know each other. The
events she creates are the kind where people leave feeling less alone and that’s entirely intentional.
Kay also serves as Trustee and Partnership Director for Cradle, a baby loss charity supporting families through one of the hardest experiences imaginable. It’s work that asks a lot emotionally, and she shows up for it anyway with compassion, consistency, and a real commitment to making sure those families feel seen.
Kay is thrilled to be co-hosting this event alongside
Christine Spencer, and excited to be part of a day dedicated to giving women an honest, supported space to talk about how they’re really doing.
Everything Kay does comes back to the same belief: that women are better when they have each other. She’s built a career on proving it.
At the event Kay will talk about –
Breaking the Silence: The Taboo of Miscarriage
Kay draws on her deeply personal radio documentary, The Emptiness Within
(available on BBC Sounds) to explore why miscarriage remains one of the most unspoken losses so many women carry.
In a talk that is honest, compassionate, and long
overdue, Kay unpacks the silence, the shame, and the isolation that so often surrounds pregnancy loss, and asks why we still struggle to talk about it openly. This is a conversation that needs to happen—and this is the space to have it.
Hilary Dancing
Hilary will be available to support you in offering
kinesiology and body-based work to support the nervous system and help the body find rest.
Using a range of approaches including kinesiology, coaching and energy healing; the work is designed to help you find your way back to balance and wellbeing when life has placed them under prolonged stress.
Hilary supports people with anxiety, burnout and physical discomfort and is particularly aware of the specific needs of highly-sensitive and neurodiverse people.
If you are interested in the work that Hilary does, she will be offering some taster sessions for a small fee/donation.
Natasha Hurst
Natasha is a Holistic Nutritionist, Integrative Hormone Specialist and the founder of the Natrition Method — a healing protocol she built from five years of research after healing herself from Endometriosis and PCOS when surgery and modern medicine failed her.
Her approach is unlike anything else in the women's wellness space. Where most practitioners treat one system,
Natasha addresses seven — gut health, nutrition,
endocrine disruptors, Eastern medicine, nervous system regulation, mindset and lifestyle architecture. Because hormonal health in women has never been a single-system problem.
She works with women dealing with Endo, PCOS, hormonal imbalances, Peri Menopause and Menopause- and helps them stop surviving and
start living.
Lynne Kilford
I am Lynne, the heart behind Rise and Release. My journey began in 2014, when I experienced the unimaginable: the unexpected and sudden loss of my daughter. That moment shattered everything I
thought I knew about who I was and my purpose. I found myself disconnected and for a decade I moved through life in a haze, searching for something that could help me make sense of the pain and to find a way back to myself.
Neuroscience and Kundalini helped me to reconnect with who I truly am beneath the sorrow. I trained to become a Grief Life Coach because I knew I wanted to support others in a way that was not there for me. I am a Kundalini Facilitator, Women’s Circle and Grief Circle Facilitator and a multidimensional healer.
Whether you are navigating loss, seeking spiritual growth, or simply feeling called to reconnect with YOU, I am here.
Steph Carson, Veronica
Baldwin
Steph Carson: An experienced facilitator and coach, based in Harrogate in North Yorkshire.
I have gained valuable insights into many of the issues that women grapple with as they develop and grow. Imposter Phenomenon is one of those themes that has convinced me of the need to offer specific support and input.
Using my wide range of skills and techniques, I will share my understanding of imposter phenomenon and what women experiencing this can do to change their responses and gain consistent confidence.
Veronica Baldwin
One of my deep beliefs is that we are all more capable than we think. Many of us hold ourselves back or incur extra stress by overthinking situations or not taking action.
I have been supporting women to build their confidence and hone their skills for more than 15 years through 1 to 1 coaching and leadership
development programmes.
Using coaching, psychometrics and NLP (neuro linguistic programming) techniques, I support women to understand their strengths and develop confidence to achieve their goals.
We think you will agree that the range of interactive sessions and expert speakers promise a packed day of sharing and learning. The Women’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Festival will be a motivating and inspiring all-day festival that is not to be missed!
Let’s come together to celebrate resilience, foster inclusivity, and empower women to thrive.
Join us on 18th June 2026 at Glow in County Durham.