Who is 5th Place?
Explore who is behind 5th Place, what inspires us and why we chose the name.
The founders of 5th Place
Chantal Dawtrey
Chantal educates for, and enables, a greater understanding and appreciation of emotional fitness. She co-creates strategies to build and sustain emotional, mental, physical and relational fitness through coaching, training and speaking engagements.
Chantal’s mission is to support the growth and development of emotionally fit, connected human beings that want more for themselves and the world that they live in.
She facilitates sustainable personal, group and team change. Leveraging strengths and diversity, she offers a "both and" approach to improved performance that includes building emotional fitness, self care and heart centred leadership.
She spends a large portion of her time curating content for a variety of platforms to advocate for greater awareness about emotional fitness, including the podcast Emotions matter. Really! that she produces with Matthew.
She lives by the maxim that change starts with you. And the way to improve work, life, health and wellbeing is to reconnect to your body's intelligence.
Chantal is a credentialed coach and registered coach supervisor with COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa) and a past chairperson of the Research and Supervision Portfolio Committees. She is a qualified teacher, a Neuro Linguistic practitioner, and has an MPhil in Management Coaching (cum laude) through the University of Stellenbosch Business School.
Chantal is the co-founder of 5th Place and co-creator of Shape of Emotion and the Model of Emotional Fitness.
Matthew Green
Matthew loves to connect with people and inspire them to become more engaged with their feelings. He's been meditating since he was 10 years old, is a qualified aromatherapist, EFT (tapping) practitioner and coach. He's studied Waldorf education, NLP and has been researching and working with human development potential for the last 30 years.
His favourite maxim is: “If you don’t know where you are how can you move to somewhere else?”
Matthew works with those battling chronic anxiety of all forms, depression, sudden and unresolved traumas as well as disempowering beliefs originating from childhood experiences.
Matthew facilitates and coaches teens, young adults, and adults of all ages to accept where they are and what they feel so they can live happier, more fulfilled and purpose driven lives.
Matthew is the co-founder of 5th Place and co-creator of Shape of Emotion.
The other members of the 5th Place team
Clive Sibindi
Portia Mpofu
Tristan Green
Why the name 5th Place?
We often get asked why 5th Place? Why not 1st or 2nd or 3rd? There is a story behind the choice of the name. It is short. Here it is.
First, second, third and fourth place
Ray Oldenburg, author of The Great Good Place defines the first place as home, the second place as work and the third place as the place where community gathers for recreation, such as coffee shops, parks and sports facilities.
The fourth place we have defined as social media spaces like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on.
What then is the fifth place?
5th Place
5th Place is the space of connectedness, community, possibility, well-being and equality of all people. 5th Place asks us to build a better world through the realm of feeling. It is anywhere and everywhere that asks us to feel more, heal, learn, grow, engage and it starts with me.