New Speakers Autumn 2026
As we come to the end of summer and the start of Autumn we are delighted to have added 4 new speakers to our website.
Smajo Beso – Smajo brings a rare ability to combine lived experience of the most extreme test of human values imaginable with two decades as an architect, having fled Bosnia and now as a researcher, lecturer and keynote speaker – studying how human beings learn, lead, and flourish under pressure.
Darren Harris is a blind Paralympian, psychologist, and speaker with an incredible story and a powerful mission to help others to go from adversity to achievement.
Tom Stroud and Dan Shrigley are the co-founders of Shoulder to Shoulder, a values-led community of over 1,700 men built around connection and purpose and speak on the importance of connection, happiness, belonging and modern masculinity.
For more details on each of them see below –
When Smajo was seven years old the war came to his village in Bosnia. In the months and years that followed, his family were expelled from their home, his father held in a concentration camp, and his beloved aunt Emina killed in the siege of Mostar. His family came to the UK as refugees in 1994. He arrived in Newcastle at nine years old without a word of English, carrying everything the war had left him with.
Three moments from those years are at the heart of everything he now teaches. His own loss of faith in humanity at eight years old. His mother’s choice, on the worst day of her life, to tell her children not to become like those destroying them. And a teacher called Mrs Webster, who taught thirty children a song in Bosnian just so one child would feel seen.
But the story doesn’t end in Bosnia. What his family chose in that moment became the foundation of everything that followed.
Smajo arrived in Newcastle with nothing and rebuilt his life through education. He studied architecture at Newcastle University, then spent several years in professional practice specialising in the design of schools, colleges, and universities, the spaces where human potential is either cultivated or crushed.
He returned to Newcastle University as a lecturer, then as a researcher, exploring the relationship between the built environment, education, and human identity. Most recently his research has moved into human geography, the study of how human beings find belonging and meaning, and what happens when those things are taken away.
Darren Harris is a blind Paralympian, psychologist, and speaker with an incredible story and a powerful mission to help others to go from adversity to achievement.
Born with a condition that robbed him of his sight, Darren eventually realised that he couldn’t change what happened to him — but he could change how he responded. This mindset shift carried him through university, into his first graduate job, and ultimately into the world of elite sport — where he would represent his country on the biggest stage.
Today, Darren inspires individuals, teams and organisations to transform adversity into advantage, using the same principles that shaped his own journey.
Darren aged one was diagnosed with bilateral retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer affecting both eyes. By his early twenties, he had lost his sight completely. The psychological toll was immense — anger, anxiety, and even depression. But even in the darkest moments, Darren began asking a powerful question: “Who is responsible for changing How I feel?” The answer wasn’t health care practitioners, or wider society. Every difficulty, every disappointment he could have blamed on his blindness, he reframed as an opportunity to learn, grow, and ultimately succeed. He decided that If you lose your sight then you unblind your mind.
Tom Stroud and Dan Shrigley are the co-founders of Shoulder to Shoulder, a values-led community of over 1,700 men built around connection and purpose and speak on the importance of connection, happiness, belonging and modern masculinity.
Tom and Dan met after a viral clip of Tom speaking candidly about masculinity and emotional openness – from his appearance on Netflix’s Love Is Blind – landed in Dan’s inbox.
A coffee between two strangers turned into a fortnightly walk-and-talk, which has since grown into a nationally-recognised community running 30+ events a month, press coverage in the Times, Independent, Cosmopolitan and BBC Radio 4, and millions of views on social media, in less than two years.
Both Tom and Dan draw on deeply personal stories: Tom’s complicated, unresolved relationship with an absent father, and Dan’s experience of his father’s six-month hospitalisation for severe depression and psychosis. Their fathers’ shared struggle with a lack of connection and purpose is a core part of the reason Shoulder to Shoulder exists today.
Shoulder to Shoulder has been described as ‘the modern men’s club fighting loneliness’ by the Independent and the ‘anti-manosphere community’ by the Times.
For more information on any of them please contact us on enquiries@scampspeakers.co.uk