Team
Advaya was founded in 2015 when two sisters, Christabel Reed and Ruby Reed, came together to create a community of learning around ecology, community and wellbeing..
Christabel Reed #
Christabel is on a mission to link inner transformation with social change and empower people to embark on the entwined journey of inner and outer healing.
In 2015 Christabel and her sister Ruby founded Advaya, the London-based system change initiative that organises around the principles of radical regeneration and joyful revolution. Since then they have launched a media platform called EarthSpace and organised over 150 events including full day immersions, panel discussions, retreats, pilgrimages, circles and festivals. In 2019 she founded the educational initiative EcoResolution with Cara Delevingne that aims to empower people all over the world to step up rather than shut down in the face of our ecological and climate emergency. During this time Christabel joined Extinction Rebellion and the Regenerative Culture Team supporting the creation of the first Rebel Sanctuary during the April rebellion and overseeing their proliferation in the October Rebellion. Christabel continues to support XR through organising donation-based retreats with Sara Zaltash and Ruby Reed.
Behind the more outward facing work is a deep commitment and passion for meditation and Yoga. In 2017 Christabel completed her Masters with first class honours in the Traditions of Yoga & Meditation. Her thesis on the Bhagavad Gita as an ecological treatise and guide on how we can come to act in the world has provided the framework for her approach to life today. In 2019 Christabel completed her four year Yoga Therapy training with Colin Dunsmuir. The work she does on a 1-1 basis with clients is the microcosm to the more macrocosm work of EcoResolution & Advaya.
Christabel has a passion for justice and an unerring fascination for how we can establish harmony where disharmony has occurred and free ourselves from whatever is inhibiting our inherent peace and power.
Ruby Reed #
Ruby is an curator, catalyst and organiser fascinated with how we can recentre our relationship with the natural world into our perception of life as a whole.
Ruby co-founded the transformative education platform Advaya in 2015 and has since then organised over 200 events bringing people together around regenerative narratives. In 2019 she co-founded the educational platform EcoResolution linking environmental justice movements with a new audience. She is a Trustee of Resurgence Trust, Director and co-founder of the new charity Initiative Earth and part of Be The Earth Foundation’s flow funding network, radicalising top-down funding. Ruby is also the Curator for educational content for Medicine Festival and part of Extinction Rebellion’s Regenerative Culture Team, where she programmed talks and wellbeing spaces during rebellions and created Rebel Retreats with Sara Zaltash and Christabel Reed.
Ruby previously worked with art collectors and completed MA degrees at the University of Edinburgh, La Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the Courtauld Institute in London. She facilitates workshops, speaks at festivals and events, and occassionally writes for websites and magazines. She is trilingual and has lived with and learnt from different cultures around the world.
Ruby is also a freediver and yoga therapist, which she taught from 2015-2020. She specialises in the therapeutic application of yoga and an approach specifically designed to an individual’s needs. She is interested in the potential held in the moment we return to and connect with the body and an expanded sense of self.
Tammy Gan #
Tammy Gan (she/her) is based in and from sunny, tropical Singapore. She is the lead of content and storytelling at advaya, and sees her work at advaya as integral to her quest, to create digital and physical community and learning spaces to build towards a more just, regenerative and loving world within our current one. As a builder and storyteller, Tammy seeks to be in service to movements, organisations and collectives that prefigure a better world, and believes wholeheartedly that it, in many ways, is already here.
