About | Interculture CIC

aboutus

Interculture is a Community Interest Company based in the heart of St Pauls, Bristol and we have been working closely with local communities and beyond since 2016. Through training, events, and consultancy we aim to increase intercultural communication, awareness, and sensitivity.. We bring people together from diverse backgrounds to break down perceived cultural barriers by creating safe spaces for dialogue around important cultural matters. We provide both virtual and in-person interactive events and training, offering an educational and supportive platform for individuals and organisations. Allyship and intersectionality is at the core of what we do.

Lisa Whitehouse

Founding Director

Through Lisa's extensive experiences living abroad, her twenty years teaching english as a foreign language, her family life and intercultural studies, she has seen that when you bring people together and open the doors to re-humanisation, there is less cultural conflict and ultimately more peace. You can change an entire person’s perspective of an entire group, just from meeting one person. This inspired Lisa to found Interculture in 2015 to address othering, unconscious bias and celebrate and support intercultural awareness.

Lisa is a multilingual (Spanish, Italian, French) intercultural trainer facilitator and consultant. She is a UK, Spanish, Italian and Colombian country specialist with over twenty years of international experience.

Lisa's Story

Lisa began Interculture in 2015, with a peace demonstration on College Green, in response to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in Paris. Concerned about the negative media backlash and the increase in Islamophobia around the UK, Lisa then quit her job as a foreign language teacher so that she could really get involved with challenging cultural prejudice and intolerance. During this time she networked with the intention of increasing knowledge of what Bristol offers with regards to diversity, refugee and asylum seeker issues, inclusion, representation and participation. She is a qualified (with 27 years European experience) English Teacher with a MA in Intercultural Communication.

With this developed knowledge, the Interculture team works to promote and support intercultural communication, and reduce othering through our training, workshops, events and consultancy.

We seek to do this by:

By providing bespoke Allyship Training.
Encouraging people to value both similarities and differences.
Creating safe spaces for people to discuss cultural issues.
Breaking down perceived cultural barriers.
Challenging people to come out of their comfort zones and ask difficult questions, therefore expanding their cultural awareness.
Organising dynamic events such ‘Challenging Islamophobia’, which included a rich mix of academics, activists, community leaders, spoken word performers, musicians and self-generated, guided workshops.
Delivering tailored workshops in schools, organisations and businesses on themes such as identity, unconscious bias, negative media representation, xenophobia, racism, tolerance, Islamophobia and stereotypes.

Our key aim is to increase intercultural awareness and sensitivity by creating safe spaces for dialogue around cultural matters and breaking down perceived cultural barriers. We strongly believe that communication is key to bringing people together as a way of progressing towards a much more interculturally friendly and diverse society.

We intentionally do not have a target demographic as we aim to make everything we do as inclusive, diverse and accessible as possible.