Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard.

How can collective healing work help nonprofits, educational establishments and communities worldwide achieve greater impact in the face of growing global chaos? And what role can trauma-informed leadership play in building institutional cultures of care? 

Maria Leistner walks these questions every day in her role as consultancy director at the Pocket Project, where she leads consulting and coaching programmes designed to help partner organisations transform from the inside out.

In this episode, Maria and Matthew explore how the Pocket Project’s trauma-informed approach differs from more conventional forms of consultancy and unpack how this work cultivates greater resilience among leaders, organisations and teams.

Maria’s career has equipped her with a unique combination of perspectives to bring to this task: her role at the Massachusetts General Hospital–based Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, where she focuses on the ethical, legal, and health dimensions of forced migration. Her perspective is informed by prior leadership in legal education at Harvard Law School and earlier experience in organizational strategy and consulting, which together continue to shape her multidisciplinary approach to addressing trauma and displacement.

By drawing on all these streams of experience, Maria supports the Pocket Project team to work with leaders to build “healing architectures” capable of supporting more grace, generosity, compassion and empathy to flow through their workplaces, and achieve their organisational goals.

“Bringing a trauma-informed approach doesn’t start with bringing a wholesale approach to the broad organization,” Maria explains. “You can’t start with the big changes without starting with the individual relationships and this is why I say the coaching is so critical here.”

Rather than imposing some preconceived idea of how an organisation should change, the goal is to work with leadership to identify and unlock latent capacities within existing teams.

“We shouldn’t see interventions like these as being outside-in,” Maria says.  “And what I mean by that is recognising the capacity for resilience within individuals and the capacity for resilience within communities: That is where the magic is; that’s where the medicine is. It’s there and we’re just partnering with them to bring it out.”

Maria and Matthew also discuss their personal experiences of challenging workplace situations – and how to transmute these into fuel to build more enlightened collaborative environments. Maria also shares about her own early trauma history – and how this shaped her lifelong commitment to ethical practice and supporting marginalised communities.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn more about cutting-edge approaches to placing collective healing work at the service of systemic change by transforming the cultures in the places we work.

To find out more about the Pocket Project’s consulting and coaching services, please click here.

Coming up at the Pocket Project:

Register for Phase 1 of the Resilience Program: Become part of a global network committed to nurturing resilience, coherence, and healing across societal spaces in this practice-based training.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project Coaching and Consultancy Services

Maria Leister on LinkedIn

About Maria Leister:

Maria Leister is a dynamic leader committed to ethical responsibility, human dignity, and the cultivation of collective care and regenerative futures. She designed and leads the Pocket Project’s consultancy and coaching initiatives, developing frameworks that support organizations and leaders in building resilient, care-centered systems. She also brings experience from management consulting, where she created and delivered leadership development programming focused on organizational change and executive capacity building. Maria serves in a leadership role at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Global Psychiatry’s Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, where her work focuses on the ethical, legal, and health dimensions of forced displacement and the needs of displaced and marginalized populations. With a background in law, including directing one of Harvard Law School’s student practice organizations, she has extensive experience in legal advocacy and U.S. immigration law. Across her work, Maria is driven by a commitment to ethically grounded impact that centers care, accountability, and the lived realities of those most affected by displacement and trauma.