Thesia Gervelie Kouloungou
More Than Just
Founder and CEO of More Than 1 Label and Label Me Inclusive platform
Thesia’s journey into EDI and social mobility began well before her professional career. After studying Sociology at A-level and university, her final-year dissertation explored the high dropout rates among African Caribbean students in higher education- Her research examined the issue through the lens of race, gender, class, and the role of cultural and social capital-all key dimensions of social mobility.
This academic grounding gave her a critical understanding of how systems reproduce inequality and shaped her strategic insight into how exclusion shows up in workplace structures and what practical, systemic solutions are needed to address it.
Thesia has built a career leading EDI strategies across funding, education, the charity sector, and central government where she was the D&I policy manager and Social Mobility lead. She developed action plans to advance social mobility, led on department-wide learning, social mobility data strategy and the social mobility employer index submission, increasing the department’s ranking by 18 places and securing its place in the Social Mobility Commission’s Employer Network. She later became first Head of EDIB for a UK National charity, where she oversaw the areas of inclusion, safeguarding, and co-production.
Her journalism background and lived experience as someone with intersecting identities- parts of which are captured in the children’s book Gervelie’s Journey: A Refugee’s Diary- shape how she sees people beyond labels. She bridges personal insight with systemic understanding, using data, research, and narrative together to humanise strategy, design more inclusive systems, and bring people on the journey with her.
Her mission is to build environments that don’t just welcome people, but are designed with them in mind. More Than 1 Label is that mission in action, a home for strategies, systems, and solutions that make inclusion not just a value, but a practice.