About us

Lyndsay Burtonshaw, she/they

Lyndsay Burtonshaw is a participatory facilitator, activist learning designer, and youth mentor. She specialises in leading facilitation skills trainings and hosting participatory away sessions, melding activist tools, somatics, arts-based activities and nature connection. Their focused yet gentle, joyful as well as real, creative and effective facilitation ensures that there is room to reflect, celebrate, to build power and channel into vision, strategy and action. It brings Lyndsay joy to work alongside incredible organisations by holding strategy away-days — in this way supporting War on Want since 2021, the Make Polluters Pay coalition since 2022, and many communities, coops, grassroots groups and social justice organisations.

Lyndsay has addressed crowds of thousands as part of the anti-deportation collective Stansted 15, including as a keynote speaker for Amnesty International. Within their role at Quaker Peace and Social Witness, Lyndsay works on the Quaker commitment to reparations, supports intersectional peace activists, and convenes regular Quaker activist gatherings.

Lyndsay was raised working class and is the first person in her family to be educated beyond age 16. She founded the Role Models Project with University of Sussex and BACA school, and negotiated its development to an academic module. Since 2021 she has mentored working-class climate justice activists through Friends of the Earth.

Lyndsay studied participatory facilitation with Robert Chambers and Andrea Cornwall, LifeBeat, generative somatics, and Change In Nature, and is currently training for Somatic Coaching Certificate with MindBody Lab. She has been part of Queers Tours of London, Beautiful Trouble and Navigate. They also love fiction, day raves, the sea, saunas, and their greyhound Kima.

Linden McMahon, they/them

Linden McMahon is a nature connection and participatory arts facilitator, and a writer; they run projects that bring together creativity, ecology, and solidarity. 

Linden specialises in creating spaces for people to think imaginatively about their relationships to each other and the ecosystems they are part of, experiencing connection through creativity - contributing to community building, nature connection and ecological healing, and increasing access to the arts. You might find them co-producing ecological arts projects with young people, teaching creative writing, or facilitating workshops in the woods. 

Linden loves collaborative projects, and they have worked with Kew, the RHS, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve and Back from the Brink to develop creative programmes which connect people with their local ecosystems.

They write poetry and fiction, as well as creating performances — from a spoken word show about fat liberation and exercise, to a sci-fi storytelling walk at Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.

Linden has a Masters in Creative Writing & Education, and they trained with Change in Nature in 2019 and Active Hope London in 2019-20. They are currently working on a qualification in Forest and Outdoor Learning, at SCQF Level 8.  They also love gardening, baking unnecessarily elaborate desserts, and making pots. You can find out more about their work on their website.

Let’s work together

Interested in working together? Email us on

<lyndsay@gatherwithus.co.uk> & <linden@gatherwithus.co.uk>

Please send as much information in advance as possible, to make our conversations fruitful, and we will be in touch shortly! We can’t wait to hear from you. We aim to respond to you within ten working days. Thank you.

How we came to be

two white queers - one trans and one femme - giggle with each other next to a polytunnel for growing vegetables and loads of blooming echinacea flowers

Lyndsay and Linden are co-founders of gather.

We met on an Active Hope London Work That Reconnects training course, and immediately felt a sense of connection — helped by Linden’s exceptional baked goods! Together we found a shared purpose — to hold meaningful, feeling-full, and joyous spaces for effective change.

We are both originally from rural Yorkshire — Lyndsay is from Howden, near Drax power station; Linden is from near Scarborough. We are an inter-class partnership.

Our shared history of working towards liberation includes getting involved in campaigning, direct action and mutual aid. Whilst we have both found utopias therein, we have both struggled with burnout. We feel called to hold more healing and regenerative spaces, so people can go on feeling resourced for action, and able to care for themselves and those alongside them.

gather is us trying to find ways to nurture the ecosystems we are a part of, including the humans who are imagining and working towards better futures. We start from knowing we are part of nature, we are not separate. We want to be part of strong, sustainable communities which can build a better world together, taking care of each other as we go.