A sense of belonging : our new Body Happy board member
We are thrilled to welcome Mohamed Abdallah as the newest Body Happy Org board member. Having spent over 22 years working to create genuine belonging for children in schools, Mohamed knows that body respect sits at the very heart of that work.
He believes every child deserves to feel they belong. Not tolerated, not managed, but truly seen, valued and welcomed, exactly as they are.
This belief has been driven by a career spanning Pupil Referral Units, mainstream all-through schools and the education charity sector. He is currently working as Regional Director in the South West for The Reach Foundation and is a trustee for Kernow Learning, a primary school trust in Cornwall. But across every setting, the focus has been the same — building the cultures, relationships and systems that make belonging real for young people, especially those most at risk of feeling pushed to the margins.
Belonging, body respect and schools
This appointment is such an important and timely one for the Body Happy Org because we know you can’t build belonging without body respect. When children are made to feel shame or anxiety about their bodies, it doesn't stay in the background. It shapes how safe they feel to take up space, to participate, to connect.
It shapes whether school feels like somewhere they belong at all. And this is something Mohamed has seen. “If a child does not believe they matter, regardless of who they are or what they look like, then our efforts around attainment, attendance or behaviour will always be limited,” he says. “A strong sense of self-worth and dignity is not an ‘add-on’, it is foundational.”
Mohamed is fully on board with our mission to build belonging through cultures of body respect in schools. And he knows what it takes to do it. Across two decades, he has worked with schools, trusts and local partners tackling some of education's most entrenched challenges, from persistent absence to disengagement, building shared responsibility for the environments children inhabit every day.
A shared vision for systems change
His experience has also been shaped by personal history. Having grown up in poverty and navigated school suspensions, Mohamed knows what it means to feel unseen within systems that are supposed to support you. So he was drawn to the Body Happy Org’s understanding that lasting change for children means reshaping the environments around them, not placing the burden of change on the children.
“Too often, we place the responsibility on the child to navigate or overcome these pressures, rather than addressing the environments that produce them,” says Mohamed. “What resonates strongly with me about the Body Happy Org is your commitment to shifting that narrative, towards a more systemic, preventative and compassionate approach.”
We are so glad to have Mohamed on our team and we can't wait to build cultures of body respect and belonging together.
