About
Choosing Rebel Led Equality means working with a team that delivers more than training, we create transformation.
Our consultants bring lived and learned expertise, ensuring every solution is grounded in both evidence and empathy. We help you move past compliance and towards lasting cultural change, with people who know how to make inclusion real, practical, and measurable.
Rebel Led Equality is a Black-led, neurodivergent-led organisation grounded in lived experience and community trust. Our team combines deep expertise across education, safeguarding, community engagement, and organisational development with authentic understanding of the barriers marginalised communities face.
Meet the Founder
Charmaine Jean-Paul
Charmaine leads Rebel Led Equality's strategic vision and delivery. A qualified Designated Safeguarding Lead with a First Class Honours degree in Education, Culture and Society (Goldsmiths, 2014), she brings extensive experience facilitating community-led research, developing EDI strategies, and supporting organisations through transformation. Her work includes Southwark Council's Black Culture Conversation and evaluating London's Creative Health Framework for the GLA. As a Black female neurodivergent leader, Charmaine centres lived experience in all aspects of organisational strategy and service delivery.
Charmaine founded Rebel Led Equality in 2023 after years of watching organisations perform equity rather than practise it. Rebellion works best when it's evidence-led. That's why Charmaine is one of the founding cohort of the UK's first MBA in EDI — Leadership for Equity, Inclusion & Organisational Development at the Institute for Equity — anchoring Rebel Led's practice in the same rigour it demands of the systems it challenges.
Meet our core team
Nalini Naidoo
Co-Director
Nalini oversees programme design and delivery, ensuring our work meets the highest standards whilst remaining grounded in community needs and co-production principles. Nalini has spent over 15 years working alongside marginalised communities in London — not on their behalf, but with them. After meeting parents in East London and seeing how few services were genuinely accessible to the women and families around her, she founded her own family support organisation in Newham, working with families navigating the intersections of race, gender, faith and income deprivation. She has since supported trafficked women, young people experiencing exploitation, and looked-after children — every choice driven by the same need: helping people find real change, and small amounts of justice.
A mother of three, Nalini sees herself as part of the communities she works within. That's why she's at Rebel Led Equality — where that belief isn't a strapline, it's the method.
Kelly Sinclair
Co-Director
Kelly leads our community consultation and engagement work, building and maintaining the trusted relationships that underpin all our research and co-production activities.
Kelly is a values-led wellbeing and engagement specialist with deep roots in culturally grounded practice. At the Southwark Wellbeing Hub she led delivery of nine therapeutic workshop programmes — including Black Space, women-only peer support and African-centred healing circles — bridging institutional services with the lived experience of Black British communities. Her earlier practice as a cultural memory coach supported diasporic families in reclaiming personal archives and heirlooms as acts of healing — work that sits at the heart of how she approaches engagement: trust first, culture always.
An active member of the Black homeschooling community and an advocate for culturally safe therapeutic and educational spaces, Kelly builds the relationships that make Rebel Led Equality's work possible — where communities aren't consulted, they're centred.
stella tuohy
Mental health lead
Stella is a qualified counsellor and registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, with a Level 4 Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling and a degree in Sociology and Media Studies. Her practice spans one-to-one counselling for adults — from anxiety through to PTSD — and school-based mental health work as a Project Manager with Place2Be, alongside earlier counselling within the NHS framework in Lambeth. Five years supporting SEND students in the classroom grounds her therapeutic work in the everyday realities of young people's lives.
Across every setting, Stella's focus is the same: making mental health support genuinely accessible to the people services too often miss.
At Rebel Led Equality, she brings that care into the heart of community work.
Our extended team
Calvin Brown - Lead for SEND and Youth and families navigating Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, bringing employment coaching experience and deep understanding of educational barriers.
Cedric Whilby - Associate Advisor and Community Southwark trustee, Healthwatch Southwark Advisory Board member, and SCHWeP network member. Cedric brings governance expertise and deep Southwark community connections.
Julia Fraundorfer - Associate Advisor. Research specialist who led on the GLA Creative Health evaluation. Julia provides methodological rigour and evaluation expertise.
Our Advisory Panel comprises senior leaders in arts, academia, and community development with expertise across social justice, youth policy, higher education, and heritage:
Nicholas Okwolu
Melissa-Jo Smith
Dr Aminul Hoque
Dr Matthew Carlisle
Marcia Samuels
The panel provides strategic guidance, challenges our thinking, and connects us to wider networks of practice and influence.
Our Youth Advisory Panel is a group of 14-25 year olds ensuring lived experience and youth voice shape our programmes, keeping our work relevant, accessible, and grounded in the realities young people face.
Rebel Led Equality operates as a Community Interest Company (CIC) with robust governance structures that ensure accountability, transparency, and community benefit.
Organisational Structure:
CEO: Strategic leadership and overall responsibility
Core Team: Operational delivery and programme management
Associate Advisors: Specialist input and community connections
Advisory Panel: Strategic guidance and challenge
Youth Advisory Panel: Lived experience insight and accountability
Decision-Making: Strategic decisions are informed by input from our core team, associate advisors, and advisory panels, ensuring diverse perspectives shape our direction whilst maintaining operational efficiency.
Community Accountability: As a CIC, our profits are reinvested into our mission. Our governance ensures that communities most affected by inequality have genuine voice in shaping our work, not just benefiting from it.
Safeguarding: Robust safeguarding policies and procedures are embedded across all activities, with all staff safeguarding trained and led by a qualified Designated Safeguarding Lead.
Quality Assurance: Regular evaluation, peer review, and community feedback mechanisms ensure our work maintains the highest standards whilst remaining responsive to emerging needs.