13/06/2026
Virginie "Vie" Clerc Lusandu
(Known professionally and across communities as Vie Clerc, Virginie Clerc, Vie Lusandu, Virginie Lusandu, Vie Clerc Lusandu, Virginie Clerc Lusandu, and Vie Olivia)
Community Consultant, System Navigation Expert, & Founder of CLaVie Consultancy
Location: Yorkshire, UK
Languages: Bilingual French / English
Virginie "Vie" Clerc Lusandu is a powerhouse system navigation expert, community consultant, and veteran grassroots organizer whose career spans over two decades at the absolute frontline of human rights, crisis intervention, and institutional advocacy. Operating seamlessly across grassroots networks and local authorities, Vie has dedicated her life to bridging the vast, cold gaps between institutional bureaucracy and actual human belonging.
Vie is the founder of CLaVie Consultancy, an independent platform providing direct, culturally intelligent insights on community resettlement, tenant engagement, and systemic advocacy across the UK. She additionally serves as an Enhanced Support and Resettlement Officer within a local authority's Homeless Migration Team, specializing in high-stakes, complex frontline casework.
The Early Blueprint: Global Horizons & Identity
Vie’s sharp sense of global justice and unique cultural intelligence began forming in her childhood, shaped by extensive international travels—including definitive early experiences in Tunisia—and navigating the complex dualities of her European heritage. Growing up across borders and systems, she learned early what it means to look at institutional frameworks through a critical lens and decode the unspoken boundaries of race, language, and citizenship in Europe. These foundational chapters instilled in her an unbreakable commitment to absolute human dignity and the belief that no system should have the power to render a person invisible.
Single Motherhood, Double Homelessness, and Pure Survival (2000–2020)
For twenty grueling years, Vie lived a double life of extraordinary public service and intense personal survival. From their births right up until 2020, she raised her children entirely alone while simultaneously working, studying, and volunteering full-time. The children’s father was overwhelmingly absent due to severe drug addiction; though he achieved sobriety in 2012 and stability by 2016, the monumental weight of financial survival, childcare, and protective stability rested solely on Vie.
During this chapter, Vie experienced the terrifying reality of homelessness - intimately learning the raw, psychological trauma of housing insecurity and the exhausting mechanics of the UK benefits and emergency housing queues. Rather than breaking her, she transformed her personal survival into a blueprint for others, ensuring her home and personal phone lines operated as a 24/7 crisis center for young people of color, isolated women, and asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants across West Yorkshire.
2018–2020: The Catalyst and the Crucible
In 2018, Vie and her son were subjected to a devastating, targeted hate crime—a harrowing experience that laid bare the hostile, fracturing impact of the Brexit divide in local communities. Rather than allowing this injustice to silence them, Vie turned this deep trauma into a powerful catalyst for storytelling, cultural defense, and national campaign work. This real-life experience directly inspired the acclaimed novel In Little Stars by bestselling author Linda Green, which captures the profound impact of the Brexit divide and the resilient power of family and community navigating systemic hostility.
The year 2020 brought a secondary succession of catastrophic, compounding trials. A severe physical accident resulted in debilitating nerve damage to her wrist, leaving her with lasting left-hand sensation issues, a tremor flare, and an inability to drive or handle basic tasks. While physically incapacitated and processing severe PTSD, Vie survived a near-fatal domestic violence assault.
Compounding this trauma, the father weaponized Vie's profound physical and emotional vulnerabilities to take the children, posturing as the parent in "shining armor" after decades of complete absence. Forced to flee to a friend's sofa alone, Vie had to navigate deep displacement and isolation from the margins of the system.
Yet, just one week after the 2020 assault, while carrying these profound psychological and physical scars, Vie stood in Bradford City Park to co-organize with Jerry Crawford and others and lead a massive, peaceful Black Lives Matter solidarity protest. She chose to turn private pain into historic, collective power.
A Historic Legacy of Grassroots & Institutional Power
Vie’s CV is a vast map of systemic disruption, coalition-building, and hands-on care work. She has consistently refused to work within just one silo, operating across unions, charities, national campaigns, and local authorities:
🏢 Frontline Institutional Casework & Strategy
Rotherham Council Homeless Migration Team: Serving since January 2021 as an Enhanced Support and Resettlement Officer, handling complex crisis cases, emergency placements, and high-stakes advocacy.
CSLHG Partnership (Rotherham): Spearheading collaborative pathways to integrate housing, health, and resettlement support across the borough.
Care Work & Intensive Studies: Balancing grueling frontline care shifts with advanced studies, refining her theoretical understanding of trauma-informed care and structural inequality.
🌍 National Campaigns, EU Rights, & Policy Advocacy
The 3million & InLimbo & Settled: A vital campaigner, proxy, and regulated OISC immigration adviser up to December 2020. She stood at the national frontline protecting EU citizens' rights through the seismic shifts of Brexit, coordinating crowdfunding, public protesting, and direct legal navigation for thousands of terrified families.
UK Butterflies: Collaborating to provide specialized, trauma-informed support frameworks for individuals navigating complex system changes and navigating EU settlement scheme.
🤝 Regional Leadership & Community Development (Bradford & Beyond)
The HEM Foundation: Managed critical community initiatives in Bradford, acting as a trusted legal and linguistic proxy for families facing deep institutional isolation.
Global Bradford: Co-coordinated major regional integration events, including the milestone Global Bradford 2019 Event, bridging the gap between local residents, municipal leaders, and arriving communities. Also provided Evisa support between September 2024 and May 2025 to hundreds of people.
Bradford Chamber of Commerce & CNet: Serving as a trusted business and community mentor, empowering grassroots leaders, and collaborating with the Refugee Forum, city of sanctuary and Bradford Champions to democratize access to funding, training, and resources.
Union Solidarity (UNISON / IWW / UWW): Championing workers' rights, structural equality, and collective bargaining power within local government and independent sectors.
British Council Active Citizens Program: Selected as a top UK community leader to deploy to Soweto, South Africa. Immersing herself in anti-apartheid community strategies, she fused the Ubuntu philosophy ("I am because we are") directly into her lifelong mentorship model.
Vie Promo: Founded and ran a vibrant music promotion initiative celebrating international sounds (Reggae, and RDC soldier (cf his biography out in 2026) as a vital vehicle for cultural cohesion and joy.
Radical Empathy & The Mosaic Vision
Through her decades of exposure to rigid bureaucracy, Vie has developed a sharp, fearless critique of traditional social care models. She rejects compliance-driven, tick-box exercises that treat human beings like data points. Instead, her professional practice is anchored in Radical Empathy—looking at the whole person to transform fragmented, broken lives into a beautiful, integrated "Mosaic" of care.
Whether she is running the private remote CLaVie Digital Advice & Letter Clinic to decode terrifying legal letters for people outside her council zone, or shaping local authority policy, Vie stands as the definitive, living "Proof of Change". Her legacy is one of absolute survival, systemic disruption, and an unshakeable dedication to helping the most vulnerable step out of systemic anxiety and walk forward into confidence, independence, and joy.
