Deepa Patel is a creative facilitator and strategic thinker with a passion for the arts, social justice, conversation and living as fully as possible in the present moment. She was born in Kenya to Indian parents and moved to England when she was ten. This experience has influenced both her professional and personal life, as she needed to find a way to belong in different worlds. Deepa has specialized in working with young people on projects as diverse as working with those at risk of offending, to co-managing Creative Partnership, a UK based national program on developing creativity in schools across England. She has worked in the field of cultural diversity and inclusion delivering training programs for organizations like the BBC and EDF energy, as well as Live Music programming and education with Serious, Outcaste Records and BBC Radio, introducing new audiences to world, classical and jazz music. Deepa has been involved in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborative initiatives, especially between the arts and sciences and was the facilitator for Free Radicals, a Nesta Project that brought together academics from different universities in the UK. She was a founding director of Slow Down London that brought together the theory and practice of adopting a new pace of living in a city. Deepa also has experience in teaching and mentoring activists on developing their campaigning skills, working with boards, staff, and organizations on how to have difficult conversations in creative ways, and major donor fundraising, having worked with Action Aid, Cancer Research UK, Prisoners Aboard and The Terrence Higgins Trust. Deepa is currently working with The London College of Fashion, UNHCR and the University of Sheffield in Zaatari, a refugee camp in Jordan, as Executive Director of the Zenith Institute, a summer meditation camp in the Swiss Alps, and as the Chair of Tamasha Theatre Company and the Loss Foundation, a bereavement support service for people who have lost loved ones to cancer. She also serves as an advisor to the Charis Foundation on their interfaith dialogue projects. She cannot imagine life without: Music, learning new things, periods of silence, and finding ways to be more playful.