Roisin Markham

“Hey, I wonder, do you have any practice recommendations for intense climate emotion?”

“I’m building a thing for ambitious people, someone suggested I speak to you…”

“Do you have any resources to help me with approach a creative writing piece I’m working on?”

“I’m speaking to a client on a prospective piece of work, what do you recommend I ask them”

“Can I pick your brain?”

People ask me interesting things.

Questions about climate grief, overwhelm and how to stay present in a world that can feel like it is coming apart at the seams. Questions about how to make a new project more useful, more human, more ambitious in the right ways. Questions about writing, research, participation, strategy, organisations, futures, collaboration, and what to do when you have a feeling there is something important in the work but you have not yet found the shape of it.

I like good questions,
especially ones that
resist a quick answer.

My work involves helping people sit with complexity for long enough to see it differently. To find the useful question beneath the first question. To name the assumptions, to make visible that which is not visible yet. To make a plan when a plan is needed. But to also notice when people are trying to rush towards action because uncertainty makes them uncomfortable.

Ah yes to support people to sit with and navigate discomfort.
I have spent years learning how to do that: through formal work, through independent research, through facilitation, through programme design, through writing, through trying things, by making things including mistakes. Ultimately by paying attention, reading widely, talking to people, and living inside + alongside some of these questions myself.
So, yes. Often, I do have something to offer.
Do not imagine I have a library or cabinet of curiosities in my head labelled answers, and that all anyone needs to do is pop by and ask nicely.
What people are often asking for is time in my diary. Attention. Pattern recognition. Context. The ability to listen to something half-formed and work out what might be needed next. A few well-placed questions. A way of connecting the practical problem to the larger system it sits inside.
They are asking for my practice.

And it is indeed a practice.

A conversation, care, or work?

There are different kinds of asking.
Sometimes it is a conversation with a friend, colleague or someone in my wider network. Sometimes it is care: checking in, sharing a resource, pointing someone towards a person or piece of work that might be useful. Sometimes it is mutual aid, solidarity, or simply a kindness, being human.
I do not want to lose that…
I care about generosity. Relationships that are not reduced to transactions are the foundation of being human. I care about the messy, informal exchange of ideas that makes good work, good communities and good friendships possible. I have learned a huge amount because people have been generous with me, and I’ve aimed to be generous in turn.
However there is a difference between a conversation and consultancy.

There is a difference between sharing a useful link and being asked to help shape someone’s offer, prepare for a client meeting, design a project, diagnose an organisational problem, develop a creative idea, or make sense of a complicated situation.
There is a difference between care and unpaid labour.
And there is a difference between someone being curious about your work and someone wanting access to the knowledge, attention and judgement you have built over years.

The latter is work.

What I can help with

The questions people bring me are varied, but there is a thread running through them. Usually, someone is trying to move towards a clearer next step.
Variations of trying to:

• Design a workshop, learning process, consultation or participatory project that people can genuinely trust.
• Make sense of a complex challenge involving people, institutions, policy, ecology or organisational change.
• Turn a broad ambition into a practical programme, offer or piece of work.
• Prepare for an important client conversation, partnership or decision.
• Develop research, writing or a narrative that makes difficult ideas clearer and more alive.
• Think through climate emotion, ecological transition, wellbeing, futures or systems change without reaching for false certainty.
• Create better conditions for a group of people to think, learn or decide together.
• Work out what is actually going on beneath a stuck situation and what might shift it.
• Check if an idea or has value and their approach makes sense

What I offer is a way of paying attention: practical, curious and grounded in the fact that social, economic and ecological issues are rarely separate from one another. I help people get clearer about what is happening, what matters, and what a useful next step might be.

How I work

If you think ‘I’d like to work with Roisin Markham’ send me a short outline of what you are working on.

It helps to know:

• What you are trying to do.
• What feels difficult, stuck or uncertain.
• Who is involved.
• What sort of support you are looking for.
• The timeframe you are working within.
• Your budget, if you have one.

I can usually tell you whether I am a good fit, and suggest a sensible first step: a focused advisory session, research and synthesis, scoping, workshop design, facilitation, writing, or something else.
I am happy to have a brief initial conversation where it makes sense. But where a question needs preparation, research, creative development, strategic judgement, detailed feedback, facilitation or sustained attention, it needs to be a paid piece of work.
Not because I want to invoice every human interaction. I don’t. But this is how I make my living, and how I protect the time and headspace needed to do the work well.

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I am getting more straightforward about this.
A clear boundary is not the opposite of generosity. It is part of what makes generosity possible. If I give away every bit of thinking, advice and care that is asked of me, there is less left for the work, people and communities I care about — including myself.
So, if you have a good question, ask it.

If you are trying to involve people meaningfully in a difficult question; build a programme, strategy or learning process with real substance; make sense of a knotty organisational or policy challenge; or bring questions of wellbeing, ecology and the future into practical work in the present, I may be able to help.

If I am the right person to help, let’s work out what the question needs — and give it the time, attention and budget it deserves.