Hello, I’m Julia Beart.
I created Pragmatic Radicals as a place for people and organisations who want to nurture and transform systems, structures and teams, but are looking for practical tools and entry points to move from brave ideas to purposeful action to inclusive impact. Through this practice, I offer consultancy support to organisations who share a commitment to working towards regenerative social justice.
I am an experienced leader, collaborator, systems thinker and consultant particularly passionate about migrant justice and climate justice. As a deep generalist and facilitator with twenty years’ experience in the social enterprise and charity sectors, my experience spans collaborative leadership, strategy, systems mapping, organisational change, shifting power, resource mobilisation and modelling, practice development, programme co-design, impact and learning, and partnership building.
Before creating Pragmatic Radicals in 2022, I led a small-but-mighty global social enterprise, where I spent seven years with an incredible team growing and re-orienting the start-up into an award-winning organisation pioneering multi-directional approaches to peer learning. With many of our programmes focused on access to care in refugee settings, I was proud to count the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) amongst our partners.
It was a big decision to step away from a front-line leadership role into the world of consultancy. But I knew that my past experience would enable me to bring deep insight into the tensions in tackling root causes of injustice whilst evidencing impact and supporting teams under a multitude of internal and external pressures.
It drives me to create practical and lasting value with and for my collaborators by being bold and ambitious, by actively listening to what is said and unsaid, and co-creating pathways for transformative change.
And after three years of exclusively freelancing, it also recently led me to step back into an in-house role as Executive Director for CIVIC SQUARE Land & Regeneration in Birmingham. I’m co-leading and stewarding the systems, structures and ways of working required to deliver the Neighbourhood Public Square, focusing on establishing the organisational and systemic conditions needed to translate long-term civic ambition into tangible regenerative neighbourhood infrastructure.
In doing so, I hope that I’ll bring a renewed energy to the freelance projects that I do take on, and an honesty and integrity that have always been core to who I am, but which become harder to hold onto the longer you have been away from those organisational front-lines, too often swapping deep long-term relationships for transactional day rates. I’ll bring a rootedness that comes from knowing that I am contributing as deeply as I can to reimagining and building regenerative futures. Making a longer-term commitment to relationships and places as a critical response to the times we’re living in.
If this feels like your kind of vibe, I can’t promise immediate availability to work together, but I can promise my practice will be rooted in the real world – pragmatic whilst daring to reimagine the systems we’re swimming in.