Meet our Team
Natalia D’Onofrio Bianchini
Company Founder, Managing Director
Passionate about serving her community and remembering the old ways, Natalia feels her strongest calling has been to raise children, with her offspring spanning sixteen years between them.
The family live together on the land at Wildlings HQ, in Oxfordshire, in a house that they built. Natalia’s children are the fifth generation of the family to live there.
Natalia has worked extensively with women over the years, as a Birthkeeper and as an Active Birth & Yoga Teacher. She loves creating entrepreneurial endeavours within our communities to enable connection and wellness.
The driver behind creating The Wildlings Group Ltd back in 2019, was the need to create community and generate agency in the way that we access learning, being together and developing ourselves and each other.
What started as a small and casual alternative education setting, has grown to Natalia running multiple businesses and non-profits for home educators and Alternative Provisions for children and young people.
She believes we need more and more spaces in our locailites for children and young people that are not able to access the conventional school system and thrive instead in the outdoors, being able to move freely, listen to their bodies, understand their nervous systems and engage naturally with friends, mentors and the natural world around them. This is true learning and from here, everything else flows.
Wild AP Manager / Trainer / 1:1 mentor
Sam is a gem of a human and children just gravitate towards her!
She has worked at Wildlings since 2021 and brings such grounding and fun and kindness to the space. She has worked with children for over 20 years and you can see why.
At Wildlings, Sam leads our Alternative Provision, training & supervising Mentors. She specialises in work around challenging behaviour, school exclusions, autistic spectrum disorders, work with looked after children & young people, and Special Educational Needs.
As a trained youth and community worker and complementary therapist she uniquely combines both her extensive therapeutic, youth & community work skills and training, proving to achieve the best possible outcomes for those that she engages with.
Sam is dedicated to developing the understanding of and responses towards behaviour. She believes that it is vital that we, as care providers become conscious and self-aware of our own behaviours, reactions and responses and adapt our methods and approaches to best suit the developing needs of each individual that we engage with - particularly those who have additional needs or are neuro-divergent.
Sam is committed to educating, empowering, and upskilling; to building self-confidence and resilience, raising aspirations and sharing skills, knowledge, tools and experiences that enable people to go on to be the best that they can possibly be.
Sam has her own wonderful company which you can read more about here: A New Way Of Being
Samantha Young
Wildlings Education Tutor
Gemma Juel views tutoring as a way to support the developmental, emotional, intellectual, and creative growth of children and teenagers.
With over 10 years of experience in Special Educational Needs (SEN) across Key Stages 1, 2, and 3, Gemma attained Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in 2013. She spent five years teaching English at a school for boys with specific learning difficulties, particularly dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, ASD, executive function challenges, and social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties.
Gemma has taught in both state and private education sectors, holding leadership roles within the staff. In 2021, she left mainstream education to focus more closely on working with children who find the conventional system challenging. Her expertise lies in supporting young people with SEN (whether formally diagnosed or not) and those who are homeschooled, unschooled, or struggling in traditional school settings.
Gemma is passionate about placing mental and emotional well-being at the heart of learning, believing that personal development and self-awareness grow from this foundation. She brings warmth and compassion to her work, creating a supportive and nurturing environment. As a natural storyteller, she is articulate, creative, and playful, and encourages these qualities in the children she works with.
Read more about Gemma here.
Gemma Juel
Facilitator
Georgia has worked at Wildlings since 2021, initially as a Facilitator on site, and then expanding to working in the back office and cultivating our beautiful social media profile. She brings her skills to Wildlings currently in various formats, always with her wonderfully personable nature and deep connection with and understanding of young people.
A background as a Multidisciplinary Artist, Performance Researcher and Creative Facilitator, in 2020, Georgia graduated from Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance with a First Class Honours degree in European Theatre Arts (Training the Contemporary Performer). During her studies, she engaged with a diverse range of performance styles, creative practices and types of investigative research.
In Spring 2019, she moved to Poland for two months and completed an Erasmus Intensive Traineeship with The European Centre for Theatre Practices Gardzienice.
Her love of learning is energised by an affinity for investigating how experiences shape our comprehension of lived existence. She is especially interested in Phenomenology, processes of embodiment and the effects of holistic transformation.
To inspire awareness of the individual’s connection to the natural world, and their relational agency as a conscious being, Georgia aspires to support others in developing their own methods of imaginative discovery and creative exploration.
Georgia Rose Stewart
More of our Facilitators & Mentors
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Luca D'Onofrio
Support Facilitator / 1:1 Mentor / Tutor
Luca has direct experience working with young people since 2019 when he was a team leader for foreign students visiting Oxford.
He graduated from the University of Sussex in 2021 with a First Class Honours in Psychology.
He has tutoring experience in languages and academic studies. He runs tutor groups at Wildlings online and in person since 2022. In addition he teaches at a tutorial college in Oxford.
Most recently he has undertaken trainings in:
A Youth Worker’s Tool Kit / Sam Young / January 2022
Child Communication Workshop / Rosie Frost / July 2021
Talking Circles / The Visionaries / 2021
Developing Role Models: Peer- Led Mentoring in Schools / University of Sussex / 2019
Luca is taking a year out to travel and deepen his training in Muy Thai in Thailand.
We will be excited to see what amazing stories of adventures he will share with us upon his return!
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Zoë Zahava
Artist and Creative Workshops
Zoe brings us fantastic workshops that are full of incredible ideas, integrating into games and stories, culture, history and fantasy.
She brings quality and depth of activity to all ages, with her warm and personable style.
After several years working in events, Zoë trained as a Secondary Art and Design teacher with the University of Brighton. She worked in mainstream Secondary Schools in East and West Sussex, teaching art and photography before setting up ZO + CO in 2021.
Her main mission lies in facilitating workshops that make participants feel good about the creative process, whilst learning new processes and skills. She has an evolving interest in Process Art - the idea that artistic endeavours can focus on the creative journey, rather than always the finished project - and also the ways in which art and nature intersect.
She is an advocate of the therapeutic benefits of art when facilitated in the right environment, and is passionate about facilitating experiences which keep children curious and excited about art.
Instagram: @zo.and.co.art
Website: www.zoandco.art
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Justine Gens
Master Forager & Herbalist
Justine makes foraging approachable, for people of all ages, skills and interests. Her laugh sings out across woodland and she offers a light touch style of sharing information, which draws into practical skills and experiences for attendees almost immediately.
Driven by a sense of community, Justine practices the art of foraging and herbalism with gratitude. She teaches how to identify, harvest and embrace wild plants with a sustainable approach.
As a trained herbalist, she helps you understand the impact of plants on your physical and mental health, but also their role within the local biodiversity. Ecology, as we know, is a priority.
She teaches wildcrafting & wild cooking workshops all over Oxfordshire and beyond.
To create her herbal medicines, she uses locally foraged plants, wildcrafting methods and distillation.
Justine hopes to inspire people to respect the ground by getting to know it better.
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Kyle Evans
Games & Sports workshops
Kyle was home educated and as such has a great perspective on the natural learning potential of young people.
Kyle has the capacity to hold a group of teenagers really solidly while allowing much freedom and fun to be had in a self directed way.
A favourite game of ours at Wildlings HQ is ‘Capture the Flag’ which, when played in the woods becomes and massive feat of strategy, grit and determination. With a massive amount of fun and laughter thrown in!
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Ted Glendinning
Axe throwing, music and sound exploration
Multi-talented Ted brings us something new each time they visit!
Watch this space for more amazing workshops coming up…
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Ebony Gheorghe
Multi-talented Ebony is a mother, a forager, a wild crafter, a martial artist, a geologist, a photographer and editor… the list goes on!
She has brought many interesting subjects to the young people of Wildlings to date and we cannot wait for more!
Look out for her up-coming book, soon to be published.
