Fellows and convenors
Network
We asked our amazing first wave of Convenors and Fellows to share their bios and headshots, and this page is the result! We are so honored to be part of such a vibrant living and learning community. Names are listed alphabetically by surname, not by seniority, role, or any other such metric.
Convenors
Bill Baue
As an internationally recognized expert on Sustainability Thresholds, Thriveability, and Online Stakeholder Engagement, Bill Baue catalyzes systemic transformation. As a serial social entrepreneur, he has co-founded several enterprises: r3.0, Sustainability Context Group, Sea Change Radio, and Currnt. Baue currently serves as Senior Director of r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a not-for-profit common good that networks a global community of Positive Mavericks focused on transcending incrementalism to trigger necessary transformations that enact living systems principles. In this role, he servers as the Systems Convener for the Connecticut River Valley Bioregional Collaborative of the Capital Institute’s Regenerative Communities Network. He also serves as the Convener of the Measurement Scorecards workstream of the Transformations Systems Mapping & Analysis Working Group. Baue has worked with prominent organizations across the sustainability ecosystem, including Audubon, Cabot Creamery Coop, Ceres, GE, Harvard, International Integrated Reporting Council, several United Nations agencies (UNCTAD, UNEP, UNGC, UNRISD), Walmart, and Worldwatch Institute. He serves on the Board of Co-op Power, the Technical Advisory Group of the Science Based Targets initiative, and as Senior Advisor to Preventable Surprises. He lives near the Connecticut River Valley bioregion, where his daughters Clara, Emma, and Aoife periodically visit. He is a diehard Deadhead who enjoys camping, hiking, kayaking, yoga, meditation, and dancing contact improvisation.
Kirk Bergstrom
A social entrepreneur, Kirk enjoys architecting ideas and making things real. Growing up at the base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Kirk cultivated a deep commitment to the living systems of Earth and the wisdom of nature. He is passionate about big-picture thinking and our collective potential to create a flourishing future. Kirk currently serves as President of WorldLink, a public benefit organization based in San Francisco. He has also served as Vice Chair of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and Executive Director of the Nourish initiative. Kirk recently co-taught an undergraduate course entitled Design for Global Transformation at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of the course experience, student teams designed a planetary-scale strategy with the potential for real-world transformational change.
Suzanne Bowles
Suzanne is a transformation systems field builder who brokers catalytic partnerships through equitable design. She brings 18 years’ experience in strategic and resource development for grassroots systems change organizations. Suzanne’s social innovations lens began in 2004 with her activist days at low income people’s rights org Arise for Social Justice and the E.F. Schumacher Tools for Change Workshop. Her passion for community economies awaked, she went on as Development Director at Alliance to Develop Power. Later, at Tostan, she learned of community-led values deliberation as a lever for social norms changes and dynamic equitable shifts at scale. She is the Co-Lead of ReGenerosity: Story and Flow at the (T)Systems Network, a founding member of Catalyst 2030. Her leadership in the areas of trust based philanthropy and community-based generosity design support Suzanne’s partners in aspiring to previously unimagined possibilities together.
Scott David
Scott David is the Founder of Shapeable – a unique digital platform and consultancy for collaborative impact networks. He has more than 20 years of experience working with global organizations, including the World Economic Forum, where he was a member of their leadership team for seven years. He is also Innovation Director at GraphAware – one of the world’s leading knowledge graph and machine learning agencies.
He speaks on Artificial Intelligence, innovation and digital platform strategy, and holds degrees in both Philosophy and Design.
At the World Economic Forum, Scott led digital innovation strategy and design across their platforms for data-driven knowledge and communities of global leadership. This included their flagship Global Indexes and Strategic Intelligence Maps, which reveal the context for how industries, economies and global issues inter-connect and impact each other.
Lee Eyre
Lee Eyre: Ph.D. researcher at the University of York in the UK exploring how emerging forms of embodied cognitive science embodiment can support systems transformation. Professionally, I work as an action researcher using micro-phenomenological approaches to model the capabilities of individuals and teams who consistently perform well. In my current research, I am using this to model practitioners working towards bioregional transformations.
Tsitsi Loice Maradze
Based in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi is an independent Development Consultant and Organisational Development (OD) Practitioner and Trainer with more than 19 consecutive years of consulting experience. She has worked with the public & private sectors as well as civil society organisations in Southern, East and West African Regions designing customized processes that suit their specific needs and contexts, and ensuring quality results at the end of the process. She has also facilitated numerous national, regional and international workshops for many clients and in different sectors of development. Tsitsi has extensive experience as a consultant in organisational development, change management, institutional development, governance, leadership, project cycle management, strategic planning & management, HIV, rights-based programming and gender as well as capacity development especially for civil society organisations. She has also facilitated numerous national, regional and international workshops for local, regional and international organisations using appropriate participatory methods. Her passion is to unlock potential in
others. Tsitsi holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons) degree in Politics and Administration, a Post Graduate Diploma in Development Management, and a Masters Degree in Development Management through distance learning from Open University UK.
Katharine McGowan
Katharine began her academic career as a traditional Canadian historian – and this eventually led her to be the annoying fact-checker and long-term perspective haver on social innovation at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience. Her joy in public speaking and mild likeability led to a position with Social Prosperity Wood Buffalo (SPWB), a community-based project in Fort McMurray that sought to support a culture of social innovation. This directly led to her current position as Assistant Professor of Social Innovation in the Bissett School of Business.
She has not abandoned her historical roots however, and has written numerous (not too numerous!) studies and edited a volume of historical social innovations, and historical transitions, including the Black Death and now the Luddites (prescient? no, or at least I hope not), which has necessitated significant learning by doing, failure and hopefully ultimately some lessons learned on effective interdisciplinary work on complex problems (with even a few resultant publications). This has even informed a class that uses public health and public sanitation, especially the toilet’s long, storied history, as a backbone for a course on social innovation theory and the SDGs.
Katharine is currently helming/coordination the Apaat tsi kani takiiks, a three-year Indigenization initiative that builds on the Suncor Aboriginal Business Education Pilot Program. That is, helming it until the incredibly impressive and driven Bissett Aboriginal students mutiny and take over the ship. She can’t wait to live in the Canada they are going to (re)build.
Per Olsson
Per Olsson leads the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s work on transformations for sustainability, working with agency and system entrepreneurship. His current research focuses on agency and system entrepreneurship, social-ecological innovations, transformations to sustainability, and how to reverse current trends of crossing critical thresholds and tipping points in the Earth system. He has co-authored several book chapters, including one for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and articles in scientific journals, including Science, PNAS, TREE, Ambio, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Management, and the Annual Review of the Environment and Resources. In 2019 he was recognized by the Web of Science as one of the world’s most influential researchers of the past decade. He is an active member of the Resilience Alliance, and a subject editor for the journal Ecology and Society. Olsson maintains an extensive international scientific network, including researchers at the STEPS Centre (UK), Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (Canada), and DRIFT Institute (The Netherlands). Related to this, he also is the hub leader for the ISSC funded Transformation Knowledge Network, and serves on the Advisory Committee to the Future Earth Knowledge Action Network on Transformations to Sustainability. Recently, Olsson has developed the concept of T-labs (Transformation labs), a new methodology for generating innovative approaches for re-wiring social-ecological systems.
Olsson is a transdisciplinary researcher and has worked in the interface of natural and social sciences and humanities. He has been instrumental in developing the research fields of local ecological knowledge, adaptive co-management, and adaptive governance. This work has involved theoretical development based on field research using both qualitative and quantitative methods for gathering and analyzing data. His work has explored the interactions between actors, institutions and organizations and focused on the emergence of integrated approaches to the management and governance of natural resources. His work has crossed local to global scales, including local water governance to multi-lateral institutional contexts, in the north and south, including Solomon Islands and Australia, and in a wide range of systems, such as marine, water, food, urban, and agriculture. Olsson has served as the course leader for many Masters and PhD courses. Olsson has supervised two postdoctoral researchers, five PhD Students, and more than 20 Masters students.
Glenn Page
Glenn has over 30 years of experience working on the pathways to regeneration from large scale ecological restoration of landscapes/seascapes to design, implementation and evaluation of large scale systems change. Glenn founded this working group as approach to build better systems for seeing, connecting and accelerating transformative change. In 2001 he was awarded the title of “Environmental Hero” by U.S. Vice President Al Gore. At SustainaMetrix, he leads an interdisciplinary team in ongoing consultancies in ecosystem science and research, policy, education, economics and multi-media communications. Founder of SustainaMetrix, a social and ecological enterprise with the vision to build capacity for the ecosystem stewardship and governance response to ecosystem change. Clients include NOAA, the United Nations, US Agency for International Development, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative, Tufts University, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the Chesapeake Bay Trust, Walton Family Foundation and the Living Oceans Foundation. Developed a wide range of custom tools and protocols for improving collaboration, systemic learning, and building adaptive capacity for ecosystem-based management.
Jim Ritchie Dunham
Jim is president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity, a global research nonprofit, active in 39 countries, describing and field-testing the characteristics of systems change in groups large to small. Jim authored Ecosynomics: The Science of Abundance (2014) and co-authored Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources (2001). He has written many articles on systemic strategy for academic and practitioner journals, and blogs regularly at jlrd.me. He has a BS in Petroleum Engineering from UTulsa, an MIM from Thunderbird, an MBA from ESADE, a PhD in Decision Sciences from UTAustin, a postdoc in system dynamics and organizational studies from MIT, and a postdoc in psychology and Langer mindfulness from Harvard.
Gurpreet Singh
As an Analyst with the Evaluation & Learning team at the Skoll Foundation, Gurpreet captures, synthesizes, and shares information on the Foundation’s awardees, their impact, and the issues on which they work. He’s especially interested in learning more about, and advancing, the Foundation’s knowledge management practices and its understanding of the systems from which the world’s most pressing issues emerge. Prior to joining the Skoll Foundation, Gurpreet held multiple positions in the Evaluation & Learning and Organizational Effectiveness departments at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Although he had worked with a couple of small non-profit organizations beforehand, the Packard Foundation was his first introduction to the complexity of social change efforts worldwide. Gurpreet completed his undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Global Poverty at U.C. Berkeley. An explorer at heart, he enjoys diving into new books, music, cuisines, urban adventures, and more. He’s thoroughly enjoying his journey through life, while attempting to fulfill his obligations to the community of life on Earth that makes this journey possible.
David Takahashi
David and his wife Emily live in Boulder CO and are members of the Shambhala community. Having lost their home in the wildfire of 2010, they are somewhat Climate Refugees. Starting in 2015, they have reduced their carbon footprints from 17 MT (Metric Tons GHG) to 2 MT, an 87% reduction over four years. They did this with a 60-year-old home. Professionally, David is a retired Software Engineer. His recent work involved Infrared Spectroscopy, Satellite Imagery Search, and Location-based Services. He has two patents, one in agricultural biochemistry and another in 3-d mapping. He has a full breadth of development experience and is a Scrum Master. He is a natural Data Wrangler. He finds comfort in the intersection of Agile Process and Innovation. David is involved in sustainability organizations at the neighborhood level, the city level, as we as the regional, state, national, and global levels. At the neighborhood scale, he is active with Accelerate Neighborhood Climate Action, a Denver non-profit he is trying to land in Boulder. David is working with the City of Boulder to help achieve its Climate Action goals, anchoring Interfaith participation with Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD). At the state level, he is working with Together Colorado, an interfaith advocacy organization seeking just legislation in Climate Action as well as affordable housing. David is also a GreenFaith Fellow, which is a global interfaith non-profit actively joining worldwide faith communities.
Fellows
Melina Angel
Starting her professional path in theoretical and evolutionary biology with a systemic and cognitive view of living systems, Melina Atrix understood evolution in contexts of community and complexity. With a master degree on biomimicry and as a BPro, she has been asking nature about regeneration and evolution at different scales, from individuals to ecosystems to be applied on human systems. She is deeply engaged in the Regeneration of the planet and the evolution of humans so she leverage projects as “Liquidify humanity”, co-creating Colombia Regenerativa of RCN, coordinating ecological restoration processes, teaching at a master degree of sustainable living systems. She co-funded BioSystemics (http://syslab.co/biosistemica/) which consults for private, public and civil organizations and do mobilisations projects globally. Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/melina-angel-94434b4/) and 7vortex (https://www.7vortex.com/ecosystems/81f727c5-a0e8-4dbb-8789-4a4080df3744…).
Hugo Araujo
Certified Biomimicry Professional/ Bioartist.
Belgium/ Mexico/ Colombia
Hugo is one of the first of the 30 Biomimicry Professionals worldwide, awarded by the Biomimicry Institute in 2013. He has taken part in grounding research in the field of Biomimicry, travelled to remote locations exploring diversity of ecosystems, including human. Hugo is also an artist, reflecting on his scientific and social learnings through his art.
Hugo has wide marketing and sales management expertise from companies such as Nike, Unilever, IBM and Kimberly Clark in Paris, Spain and Mexico. He is an entrepreneur since 2007 with special focus on sustainable innovation and business. Expert in managing multidisciplinary teams he has developed new systems and methodologies and tools for impact management. Thanks to his international background, his strength relies on his power of adaptation to any context: geographical, cultural or social. His main drive is to encounter planet, people and future generations solutions.
Andrealisa Belzer
Andrealisa Belzer is a Credentialed Evaluator with a background in Health Education and Biology. She has evaluation experience in NGO’s, various levels of government, as a freelance consultant and volunteer. She is committed to evaluative processes and products that promote collective consciousness and adaptive management for mutual benefit within human- and eco-systems. She is a federal Senior Evaluation Advisor within Indigenous Services Canada, Chairs the Canadian Evaluation Society Sustainability Working Group, serves as president of CES Nova Scotia Chapter, and participates in the EvalPartners EvalIndigenous network as well as Blue Marble Evaluation Network. Fluent in French and German, she is a dual Citizen of Canada and the USA. She is an amateur sprint kayaker and proud mom of two.
Juliana Bohorquez
Founder of Meráki®; BFA from Universidad de los Andes, Master in Systemic Pedagogy from CUDEC (Mexico), Master in Education for Development and Global Learning from UCL (London). Certified coach, Organizational Systemic trainer (Hellinger Instituut Netherlands) and Master Trainer from INFOSYON (Germany).
Mobilization director at Movilizatorio a Colombian organization, university professor of the Transdisciplinary Master of Systems of Sustainable Life (Universidad Externado de Colombia) and at the EAN University. Founded SysLab® (Systemic Lab), dedicated to research and amplify ‘bio-systemic’ work, a framework she co-created in Colombia. Leadership and systemic thinking consultant.
Researcher and co-author of national education programs with the Educational Alliance for Colombia. Since 2005 she has worked on social transformation in the framework of the Colombian armed conflict, as an activist, film documentary filmmaker, researcher and photographer. She was one of the founders of the ‘Peace Camp’ and one of the leaders of the 2016 citizen movement. She directs mobilization and communications processes for campaigns such as Colombia Cuida a Colombia, among others. Organizes annually the Vision Quest with Grandmother Margarita and meetings of spiritual relevance.
Katharina Braun
Katharina grew up in an environment that supported cross-cultural understanding. She has always enjoyed creating intercultural connections and exploring different cultures and view-points. She always felt a deep connection to Mother Earth and all living beings. Nowadays, she sees the need to mediate for the greater good, between people and nature as well as people and people. Hence, she studies “Global Project and Change Management” in the Netherlands. A study which combines research, project management and leadership with the need to change our world for the better. All projects she did were closely related to the SDGs as well as the Earth Charters mission to inspire global responsibility for our ecosystems and all living beings.
Since, she has learned much about creating new economic systems, well-being on different socio-economic levels and impact evaluation to create lasting positive change. She is excited to be part of the working group “Flow and Story” for this extraordinary endeavor of System Mapping and Analysis for a brighter, richer and more transparent world! Currently studying in Costa Rica, she will finish her bachelor thesis at the end of this year.
“I love to connect with likeminded people for our common good and planetary well-being! Let’s integrate sustainable system changes and individual actions for a more just and healthy earth for all living beings!”
Bruno Conte
Currently, I am looking for opportunities in global initiatives aimed at social transformation where I can contribute with my time and knowledge to solid endeavours which can be translated into substantial social impact. In this context, TSM&A’s fellowship suits perfectly to my personal principles, career goals and plans for the foreseeable future.
In 2017, I achieved the Bachelor of Business Administration and IT at The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul – 20th in the ranking of Latin American Universities, also through a very competitive scholarship programme. Throughout my student years, I have experienced the different dynamics of power in the current social and economic system in Brazil – through internships, professional and leadership positions in the public, private and third sectors; these experiences have enabled me to identify the current system’s benefits and challenges in the context of a globalised society.
In addition, through my personal experience as a queer Latino, who has lived the majority of his life in a favela community in the most unequal country in Latin America, I have been exposed first-hand to issues of violence, poverty, exclusion, social injustice and many other traumas. Consequently, I endeavour to address these issues at the community level initially, and, hopefully, at a larger scale later on, using the network and knowledge that I have built over the years.
Finally, having experienced and studied the wicked problems that orbit our planet, TSM&A is a valuable opportunity for me to collaborate with a community of skilled professionals, and to co-create responses that acknowledge the root causes that have led us to the Anthropocene.
Adam Hejnowicz
Adam P Hejnowicz is a social-ecological scientist and is presently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences and a visiting research associate at the University of York’s Biology Department. Adam is part of the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN); an ESRC Large Centre. In his role with CECAN, Adam has actively worked with policy teams in UK government departments and agencies in relation to introducing complexity systems thinking and methodologies to the challenges presented by evaluating and designing public policy interventions across water-energy- food systems, for example, in the context of post-Brexit environmental, agricultural and rural policy planning. In this regard, recent research has focused on working at the science-policy interface with academic, policy and practitioner communities in the translation and co-production of learning and knowledge. Adam has recently been appointed as a Fellow for the Transformations Systems Mapping and Analysis Working Group, supported by leaders from the McKnight Foundation and Garfield Foundation, and Co-Lead Steward for the Transforming Evaluations of the SDG Transformations Forum. Adam is particularly interested in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches and the application of mixed, hybrid and participatory methodologies to solve collective action and decision-making problems. His interests lie at the intersection of environment, development and sustainability, especially as they relate to issues around land use change and agriculture, and more broadly water-energy-food systems, in the context of livelihoods, economic development, urbanization and transformative change – both from a Global North and Global South perspective. For example, recent project work includes a GCRF pump-priming initiative focused on enhancing peri-urban ecosystem resilience in Namibia, and funded by an UNCTAD/DfID grant, sustainable manufacturing and environmental pollution in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In examining these issues, Adam considers these issues through the lens of nature-society interactions, governance, public policy, and complex social-ecological systems.
Sam Matey
Sam Matey holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science, summa cum laude, from the University of Southern Maine. He has worked as a volunteer research assistant for the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership’s forest restoration program in Kianjavato, Madagascar, and served as lead writer in the strategic evaluation of the Oak Foundation Marine Conservation Sub-programme. He has extensive data analysis, transcription, document review and editing, citizen science, technical writing, science journalism, ArcGIS, and literature review skills. Since October 2017, he has written The Weekly Anthropocene, a science newsletter available at theweeklyanthropocene.weebly.com.
Stephen Mejia
Stephen is currently enrolled in the Social Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development (SERSD) Master’s Programme at the Stockholm Resilience Center. He is keenly interested in understanding the role transformation research and practice can play in disrupting entrenched social-ecological feedbacks that perpetuate inequity and unsustainability. Stephen is deeply grateful and excited for the opportunity to co-learn, collaborate, and co-synthesize meaningful and actionable transformation knowledge as part of the Transformations Systems Mapping & Analysis Working Group. Previously, Stephen was engaged for seven years in water-focused environmental justice NGO work in his hometown Los Angeles, California, leading river-restoration projects and planning, organizing community outreach and engagement campaigns, and collaborating in coalition building with other environmental and community justice allies and organizations.
Mauricio Nuñez Oporto
Mauricio is deeply motivated by the opportunity to improve our collective stewardship of socio-ecological systems. He consistently pursues and fully engages himself in responsible, pragmatic, and incremental ways to convene and explore potential to complex questions based on regenerative practice and living systems thinking. He works catalyzing landscape initiatives and capital for ecological restoration and human wellbeing. Enabling collaboratives for multi-stakeholder partnerships to increase efficiency, impact, and scaleup a series of community-led initiatives. His burning question is how to develop an advanced landscape development hypotheses that ignite regenerative development at the bioregional scale? With this in mind, he is designing a landscape investment fund that will ensure that restoration is financially attractive while supporting rural livelihoods and wellbeing. When he is not restoring ecosystems or catalyzing landscape initiatives, he is surfing, hollow big waves, swells that hit the Peruvian coast. He also loves camping and hiking the wonderful landscapes in his backyard, the Vilcanota Mountain Range can show. He farms and engages phenomenologically with the bounties of the natural world to provide fresh produce for himself, friends, and colleagues.
Dylan O’Neill
Dylan is currently completing his Master’s Degree through the MENV program at the University of Colorado with a specialization in Sustainable Food Systems. He is highly interested in the development of regenerative and transformational systems in order to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on global agricultural communities. As the 21st century moves forward, he believes that current and emerging wicked problems will require new and complex systemic solutions. An avid runner and thru-hiker, Dylan spends much of his free time exploring the mountain trails of Colorado and beyond.