Preventing Harm with Practical Training and Building Lasting Psychological Safety

Eleonora Bertsa-Fuchs is a passionate, proudly queer, nonbinary educator and advocate, Eleonora’s work is dedicated to building a culture that is more consensual and respectful by equipping people with the practical communication skills to keep each other comfortable. Drawing on her background in education, psychology and counselling, and her work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), she empowers organisations to create safer, more inclusive environments for all.

Describe your career trajectory and how you got to your current position.

I’d always wanted to work in a field where I helped people have healthier relationships, but running my own Social Enterprise wasn’t something I had ever really imagined for myself!

I started my career as a high school teacher, teaching a real mix of subjects, including Psychology, Media and Science. It wasn’t until the Covid lockdowns that I really started thinking about building my own organisation.In my last few years teaching there was a strong, student-led push for better consent education. And we were starting to see some investment in it, but the quality of the programs just wasn’t there.

It was largely awareness based training, designed to tick a box, and didn’t leave participants with anything practical. You’d come away knowing consent was important, but still not really knowing how to practise it. So there was a gap there. And coming from this background in both psychology and education, I had that understanding of human behaviour and I thought, well we could do this better by explicitly teaching communication skills.At the same time, I could see that a lot of the social norms that play out in schools and workplaces were actually sending messages that were contrary to consent. As a society, in a lot of cases we push people into things, or make it hard to say no.

If we want to truly safeguard people from harm, we need to start with day-to-day consent in our workplace interactions, for example – to normalise asking and checking in – to make it feel natural and comfortable and everyday interactions.

So I started Let’s Talk About X to help organisations prevent sexual harassment and promote safer, respectful relationships by teaching communication and empathy skills. This is my real passion and I am so happy every time a partner organisation tells me about the impact our consent culture training has had on their team.

My lived experience as queer and nonbinary has also led to opportunities in LGBTIQA+ inclusion, and I’m so grateful that workplaces are calling out for voices like my own to guide them in their work to create a safer culture.

Tell us a little bit more about the organisation you head up?

Let’s Talk About X is a small Social Enterprise with a big impact. We partner with organisations to embed a culture of deep respect, clear communication, and lasting psychological safety.

We take a proactive approach, working alongside organisations such as Laing O’Rourke, The APP Group, Reground and International Women’s Development Agency, to help prevent harms like discrimination and sexual harassment, supporting workplaces to make a sustainable shift towards a consent culture.

Our focus is on teaching practical strategies – specific communication tools to help make an organisation safer and more inclusive. Basically we go beyond awareness based training (the laws and definitions type stuff) and focus on workshopping what you can actually say or do in different situations. Context is everything, and we need to meet people where they’re at, so we prefer to tailor all of our training to the specific workplace.

As a social enterprise, for every hour of paid training we dedicate one hour to creating and distributing free evidence-based respectful relationships resources that help to prevent gender-based violence. So far these have reached over 9000 people, and we’re really proud of the difference we’re making along with the support of our partners.

Do you have any words that you live by day to day?

For me, it’s “always think about why.” Whenever I encounter hurtful behaviour or hate, I pause and question what might be driving that person to act that way. That mindset helps me respond with empathy and compassion instead of anger.

Forinstance, I received a transphobic comment on LinkedIn recently. There’senough hate out there in the world, and I don’t want to add to it. When people lash out online like that, they’re usually driven by fear or insecurity – pushing back is only going to galvanise that. So rather than responding defensively, I replied with kindness.

I also truly believe that to make the world a kinder, safer place we need to have empathy and compassion, even at times when we might feel hurt or angry. When I’m delivering LGBTIQA+ inclusion training or delivering a keynote speech on consent culture, I aim to bring people together rather than to divide. I speak with the kindness I want others to show me, even when everyone in the room doesn’t quite see eye-to-eye.

I think the world would be a much safer place if we could pause for a moment and consider what someone else’s motivation might be before we act.

If you could go back in time, what piece of advice would you give yourself as you first embarked on your career?

Oh my, that’s a big one. Starting Let’s Talk About X has been an enormous learning curve for me, especially as I had zero experience in business or social enterprise when I first started out! I think the biggest piece of advice I would give myself back when I started out would be to talk to and seek advice from as many founders as possible, especially founders of other Social Enterprises. Everyone’s journey is so different, and no one’s advice is right or wrong – it’s just useful in different contexts.

If I could go back, I would try to learn as much as I could about different people’s experiences founding different organisations, so that I could have a wealth of anecdotes and examples to draw on when making my own decisions to guide the growth of Let’s Talk About X.Thankfully I do now have a diverse range of founders and social entrepreneurs in my network, and I am so grateful to everything I have learned from their experiences and perspectives.

What are you currently watching / reading / listening to?

I recently finished the show Watchmen, which I found to be a really gripping alternate reality with characters who were neither inherently good nor bad, but who had such complicated and valid reasons for doing both good and bad things.

I’m reading The Poppy War trilogy by R. F. Kuang at the moment, which is a fantasy series set in a fictional country inspired by 20th-century China and East Asian cultures. The fantasy books I’ve read in the past are so euro-centric and all written by male authors, so I’m finding this refreshing.

My guilty pleasure is the Hamish and Andy podcast – it’s like having two mates talking nonsense in the background while I cook dinner.