Teaching team

Our courses are run by passionate and experienced teachers, who are skilled nature guides with experience of woodland living. Our therapist trainers have many nature allied client hours.  We share knowledge and skills supporting your own discovery and learning through communion with nature as co-teacher.

We provide you with immersive and experiential learning experiences, bringing to life relational practice and awareness of community in and with nature.

Beth Collier

Course Leader and Director of the Nature Therapy School

Beth Collier (M.A., MBACP), is a Nature Allied Psychotherapist and supervisor, seeing all her clients in natural settings working in allegiance with nature to explore our emotional worlds. She started to work with clients within nature in 2012 and since 2014 has only offered nature-based sessions.  Beth has theorised our relationships with nature from an applied psychotherapeutic perspective, developing Nature Allied Psychotherapy as a modality of practice for ongoing client work. Her forthcoming book Nature Allied Psychotherapy; Exploring Relationships with Self, Others and Nature will be published by Routledge. Beth has a B.A. (Joint hons.) in Comparative Religion and Social Anthropology, an M.A. in Psychotherapy and Counselling and an M.A. in Human Rights.

Beth is a naturalist and bushcraft practitioner with an interest in traditional ecological knowledge and ethnopsychology. She enjoys natural navigation, tracking and basketry and has experience of wilderness living in Scotland and Sweden. Beth has a certificate in Advanced Wilderness First Aid. She has a life long passion for nature stemming from a rural upbringing.

Beth is the Founder of Wild in the City, an organisation supporting the well-being of urban residents  through connection with nature, offering experiences in bushcraft, natural history and ecotherapy; using the skills of our ancestors to nurture a deeper connection with the natural world and a sense of belonging to communities past and present.

Beth has a particular interest in supporting people of colour in finding their place in UK natural settings and creates opportunities for the representation of black leadership in nature.

Her work has produced ethnographies of our intimate, emotional relationships with nature. This includes ethnography of disconnection and it’s impact on the development of cultural attitudes which shun nature; experiences of people of colour in nature in UK settings and white attitudes to black presence in nature.

Beth regularly speaks at conferences and seminars on nature and well-being, from psychotherapeutic and anthropological perspectives including recent presentations at the Smithsonian (Washington D.C.), Tate Modern, Association of Social Anthropologists and Friends of the Earth. Her practice and research has been featured by Therapy for Black Girls, BBC’s Cities: Nature’s New Wild – Ep3 Outcasts, BBC Countryfile,  BBC London News, NBC Today, BBC London Radio, ITV News, ITV Lorraine and MTV Timberland Presents Concrete Green with Loyle Carner.

Beth is a Fellow of the National Association for Environmental Educators, a Fellow of the London Environmental Educators Forum, a member of Natural England’s Nature Recovery Network management group, and a visiting lecturer at the Wellbeing Faculty of the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education. She is a former Trustee of the National Park City Foundation.

Beth established the Nature Therapy School to provide high quality training to psychotherapists and outdoor professionals interested in collaborating with nature in their work supporting emotional health. She has run trainings in Nature Allied Psychotherapy since 2014.

Beth worked in the human rights field for 16 years, the last 8 of which she ran a research consultancy working in partnership with UNHCR and was commissioned as an international expert on gender based persecution. Between 2008 – 2010 she was Research and Policy Manager at the Mental Health Providers Forum, leading four panels of experts in a review of methodologies used by NICE in the evaluation of the effectiveness of psychological therapies from scientific, philosophical and service user perspectives.  She is co-author of Recovery and resilience: African, African Caribbean and South Asian women’s narratives of recovering from mental distress, London, 2011, Mental Health Foundation and Survivor Research and is author of Country of Origin Information and Women; Researching Gender and Persecution within the Context of Asylum and Human Rights Claims, London, 2007, Asylum Aid.

Beth is a regular speaker on nature and health from psychotherapeutic and anthropological perspectives, see bethcollier.co.uk

Dominique Bikaba

Associate Lecturer

Dominique Bikaba is Executive Director of Strong Roots, a conservation NGO working in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect Great Apes and their Congo Basin Forest habitat for the benefit of humans and animals. Dominique received the Whitley Award in 2018, in recognition of his innovative community based conservation prioritising indigenous knowledge and concerns.

Dominique’s family lived in what is now Kahuzi-Biega National Park, he learnt about wildlife from his grandmother who would take him into the forest from which she was evicted in the 70’s under the banner of conservation. The area is now under threat from illegal mining, and ill judged western led conservation models which exclude the Batwa Pygmys who live there. In contrast local chiefs are providing protection by allocating their ancestral land to extend wildlife corridors which support biodiversity and the Gorillas, using traditional ecological knowledge within a model of community based conservation, which also protects humans from nature loss and emphasises the cultural value of biodiversity.

Claire Smith