Nkem Ndefo, MSN, CNM, RN (she/they), is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is a skilled practitioner, dynamic speaker, and valued strategist. She is known for her unique ability to connect with people of all types by holding powerful liberatory spaces, weaving complex concepts into accessible narratives, and creating synergistic and collaborative learning communities that nourish people’s innate capacity for healing, wellness, and connection.
Her career began in the late 1980’s, providing community health education to distressed populations including injection drug users and youth in foster care. She witnessed intense suffering in these communities; her desire to relieve this suffering spurred her pursuit for the knowledge, understanding, and skills necessary to bring healing at its deepest level to all age groups.
Licensed as a Registered Nurse and Nurse Midwife, Nkem holds a Master’s degree in Nursing from Frontier Nursing University. She has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies, including Level 1 training in Internal Family Systems, Level 3 certification in Tension/Trauma Release Exercises, and Level 5 certification in Emotional Transformation Therapy.
As a clinician, Nkem has worked in settings ranging from large volume hospitals to mobile community clinics. She founded and operated a full scope midwifery and homebirth practice from 2000-2007 and she has maintained a small holistic private practice in Los Angeles since 2007. Additionally, she worked for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative researching maternal death outcomes.
Nkem has lent her expertise in the embodied trauma-informed and resilience-oriented (eTIRO) approach, embodied anti-oppression, and healing justice to a wide range of projects. She served on the Los Angeles County Trauma-and Resilience-Informed Systems Change Initiative Workgroup and developed a pilot violence-prevention academy for peer support workers as part of Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Trauma Prevention Initiative. She recently led an embodied diversity, inclusion, and antiracism initiative for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Currently she is co-directing Embody Lab’s Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certification and Embodied Activism Programs, and directing the Resilience Toolkit Certification Training Program.
She is a regularly invited speaker and has delivered keynotes and interactive presentations to organizations and collaboratives in her home country (US) and internationally, including Delta Center California, Médecins Sans Frontières Italy, Healing Justice London, and the Center on Trauma and Adversity at Case Western Reserve University. She’s an esteemed podcast guest and has appeared on episodes of For the Wild and Hurry Slowly, among many others. She is a contributing author in Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change (North Atlantic, 2024).
Work with Nkem:
Nkem welcomes new speaking engagements and community and organizational collaboration.
- For speaking inquiries, please email Lumos’ Director of Communications, Carissa Ferro at carissa@lumostransforms.com.
- To inquire about organizational collaboration, please email info@lumostransforms.com.
Nkem Ndefo is currently accepting a limited number of new individual clients. If you are interested in becoming a client, please email info@lumostransforms.com. Existing clients may schedule sessions below.
Modalities:
- Emotional Transformation Therapy
- The Resilience Toolkit
- Internal Family Systems
Individual Pricing:
- Individual Full Session | 55 minutes | $275
- Individual Brief Session | 30 minutes | $150
Mentorship & Supervision
- Personal Certified Trainer Certification Mentorship | 60 minutes | $175
- 1:1 Certified Trainer Certification Mentorship | 90 minutes | Prepaid
- Group Certified Trainer Certification Mentorship | 120 minutes | Prepaid
- Intern Supervision | 30 minutes