CANADA

    JULIAN NORRIS: Originally hailing from the British Isles, Julian is the Director of Systems Leadership at the  Banff Center where he helps to develop and run programs for systems shapers and complexity leaders, one of the key programs he is running is Getting to Maybe. He is also a faculty member at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business where he teaches in the MBA program and co-chairs the Haskayne Adventure Leadership program using wilderness and experiential learning to cultivate advanced leadership capacities. Julian’s career has centered on two distinct but inter-related questions; how to guide individuals through journeys of profound personal development and how to support the transformation of complex human systems. His work is seasoned by a great love for the bardic traditions and a lifetime spent in wild landscapes. It has been enriched by the privilege of living and working in Indigenous communities, honed through the ongoing practice of contemplative and somatic disciplines, and weathered by a lengthy apprenticeship to the complex mysteries of the human psyche and the living world. He is deeply inspired to support the many practical dreamers and courageous leaders who are working to establish new life-enhancing patterns of consciousness and culture in these extraordinary times.

    LISA GIBSON: Lisa is a consultant with over 20 years' experience in local and international community engagement, social innovation, planning and social justice work. With experience from Canada to Nepal to Nigeria, she brings a wealth of insight about how to dive into the heart of complex social and sustainability issues to embed systemic change, transform belief systems and construct alliances across diversity. Her innovative methods for building collaborative decision-making processes have successfully transformed grassroots social activism into impactful policy change and shifts in collective consciousness in a variety of settings, including as the director of Living in Community, a multi-stakeholder initiative working to create health and safety around the impacts of sex work. Lisa also has extensive experience in developing and delivering transformative curriculum for a variety of organizations, including the City of Vancouver, the Women’s Leadership Institute in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and One Sky: Canadian Institute of Sustainable Living. She holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Victoria, and a master's in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex. She is part of the team that designed the program curriculum and created the courses for Social Innovation Certificate at Simon Fraser University.

    MELANIE GOODCHILD: AnishinaabeKwe, is Moose Clan.  She is from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee First Nations in northern Ontario.  She has a Master of Arts degree in Sociology and is currently completing her PhD in Social and Ecological Sustainability at the University of Waterloo.  She is the founder and co-director of Turtle Island Gichi Gakinoo’maatiwin, a systems awareness teaching lodge, a project on the Tides Canada Platform.  In her work, she weaves together her unique perspectives of Anishinaabe gikendaasowin (original ways of knowing) with systems thinking and complexity theory to address our society’s most intractable problems.  Melanie believes in the teaching methods of her ancestors, in ‘coming to know’ on the land, and so she supports initiatives that seek to connect people to ceremony, story, art, language and the land. Julian and Melanie collaborate closely and she is also involved in the redesign of the Getting to Maybe program at Banff Center.  Melanie is a Research Associate at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation (WISIR) and a Faculty member of the Academy for Systems Change in the US.  She is a facilitator and advisor to diverse systems transformation projects.  She is an International Women’s Forum (IWF) Fellow alumna (2015/16), an executive leadership program sponsored by Harvard Business School and INSEAD.  She is a proud member of the Iron Butt Association (IBA), riding her motorcycle 1000 miles in 24 hours.

USA

    BRUCE GOLDSTEIN: Bruce is an Associate Professor in the Program in Environmental Design and the Program in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, faculty in the Masters of Environment Program, core faculty in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, and a faculty research associate in the Institute for Behavioral Science. How can communities combine forces to adapt to social and ecological challenges and foster transformational change? This is the motivating question for my work. I partner with learning networks, which enable place-based learning and system-wide adaptation to innovate solutions that are both site-specific and applicable network-wide. Learning networks do more than just solve local problems – they promote fundamental change by encouraging practitioners to engage in reflection and learning by addressing essential questions like, “What is the system in which I live and practice, and how do I want to change it?”  Accomplishing this isn’t easy, and I am particularly inspired by skilled network facilitators, or “netweavers”. Netweavers balance network-wide coherence with community autonomy, encouraging communities to experiment with new approaches that suit their circumstances. Netweavers support an open flow of ideas between communities and work to develop collective capacity that can overcome powerful resistance to systems change. To support their amazing work, I manage a learning community of netweavers, the Netweaver’s Network.

    BRUCE HULL from the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, Virginia Tech. University-based degree-granting programs, he is also part of the Netweavers Network. Bruce writes and speaks about organizations, communities, and leaders constructing sustainable development in the face of converging demographic, environmental, governance, and market transformations. He is most excited when learning and sharing lessons about innovative leaders who are forging collaborations among government, business, and civil society. He is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability.    

    JENNIFER BERMAN: Jennifer serves as Partnership & Training Officer to the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks Program and a co-designer and facilitator for the School of Systems Change Basecamp programs in America. She is fueled by a deep passion to support people and organizations to step into their fullest potential.  Her work over the past twenty years has spanned a variety of social change settings where she has led and facilitated social justice work, multi-stakeholder collaborations, systems transformation, and personal development journeys. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and a Master’s in Public Policy and Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  

     MARGARET KREBS: Margaret brings a diverse range of skills and experiences as Director of the Interdisciplinary Collaborations Program. She continues to also serve as the Program Designer for the Earth Leadership Program, focusing on defining the key leadership skills and approaches for "knowledge to action". Margaret’s commitment and experience designing leadership development programs led her to be selected as a participant in the 2014 Leadership for Collective Intelligences, led by Dialogos. She has melded the content of that training with her own interdisciplinary experience and is now co-designing and facilitating other academic-related programs such as Leading Interdisciplinary Collaborations for Stanford faculty, the AAAS program, Emerging Leaders in Science and Society and the International Social Science Council’s grantees participating in the Transformations to Sustainability Programme. Prior to joining the Leopold Leadership Program, Margaret managed two Stanford training grants to design new learning environments that integrated technology to support teaching and learning. Margaret’s interest in teaching and learning developed while she was an undergraduate in innovative study programs at Earlham College and evolved further when she became a teacher designing a “school without walls” in Philadelphia. This background inspired her future work in developing programs to bring research and innovation to new audiences in diverse settings – from an early childhood research center in New Haven, Connecticut to Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley.

    MICHAEL BEN-ELI: : Prior to founding The Sustainability Laboratory, that holds the Global Sustainability Fellows Program, Michael worked as an international management consultant, pioneering applications of Systems Thinking and Cybernetics in management and organization. Over the years, he worked on synthesizing strategy issues in many parts of the world and in diverse institutional settings, ranging from small high technology firms to multinational enterprises, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care and educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and international multilateral organizations. In recent years, he has focused primarily on issues related to sustainability and sustainable development. He is author of the widely acclaimed Five Core Sustainability Principles, and has been working to help inspire leaders in business, government, community, and youth to accelerate a peaceful transition to a sustainable future. Michael graduated from the Architectural Association in London and later received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Cybernetics at Brunel University, where he studied under Gordon Pask. He was a close associate of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on research involving advanced structural systems, and issues related to the management of technology and world resources for the advantage of all.

     SHARON COLLINGE: Sharon brings diverse leadership experience and commitment to environmental sustainability to the role of Executive Director of the Earth Leadership Program. Sharon believes that good leadership doesn’t just happen, but that it takes intention, reflection, training, and practice. As a Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2004, Sharon gained pragmatic tools and joined a remarkable network of environmental scientists that accelerated her learning and practice of leadership. In the last 15 years, Sharon has engaged in collaborative leadership and in bringing “knowledge to action” in varied contexts, including the development and launch of the Masters of Environment Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, as Chief Scientist of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and in building community-university partnerships within the newly-founded Center for Sustainable Landscapes and Communities at CU-Boulder. Sharon’s interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching focus on human-environment interactions in urban and wild landscapes. Her research emphasizes the impacts of habitat loss, fragmentation, and restoration on the persistence of native species, communities, and ecosystems, and is particularly relevant to the interface between environmental science and policy regarding endangered species and habitat protection. Sharon was elected to serve as the Ecological Society of America’s Vice President for Public Affairs from 2011-2014 and has been a member of the Board of Trustees for The Nature Conservancy of Colorado since 2016. 

MEXICO

    ANNABEL MEMBRILLO: For the last 25 years I have being a co-conspirator for systemic transformation and collaborative strategy process with a wide variety of organizations (business, not-for-profit, government, communities). Learning together, exploring new ways and agreements, designing organizations and networks structures, co-host deep change processes, integrating tools, methodologies and processes are part of the ways I support strategy and collaboration and collective transformation journeys. Besides this my work is focus in a formal exploration and descriptive research on collaborative networks and how deep aspirations for evolution manifest in the world. I also facilitated dialogs, in small groups and large, that are focused on generating strong communities. To do this work I collaborate closely with the Institute for Strategic Clarity and I recently accepted join the UMA team of directors. One recent passion of the last years is the design of learning journeys that support individuals to found and realize their potential of being transformative leaders (curricula design). I strongly believe that we are living a special moment as humanity. Over the last few years, I have met many people thinking, feeling and acting differently. They are following new rules, new ways to connect themselves, and new ways to live. I observe a transformation in the world. There is still a lot to do, but we are living in a wonderful time. The ground is ready, and the tipping point of the shift in consciousness is here and every one of us just needs to be open to “listen” to the call. Naming the “movements”, connecting this people, nourish global communities it is an important process for this shift. 

    ELIS MONROY studied Biology in the Science Faculty of the National Autonomous University of México, she has master studies in Philophy of Science. She has work as advisor or socio enviromental projects to institutions such as CONABIO, CCMSS and the mobility laboratory of the Arquitectur Section at UNAM, as well as independent projects of communication and journaling. She has collaborate with different museums in the whole country to develop proyects and educational materials, and also assembling multiple interactive exhibits, for example with the interactive Museum of Economy where she coordinate a multi-instituttion collaboration with some of the most respectful organizations in México regarding science (INECC; GIZ, CONACyT). Currently she is part of the UMA team of director where she is the Sustainability and Change Agency faculty coordinator and designer,

    VANESSA ARMENDARIZ is a methodologist and designer of multi-stakeholders processes for social systems analysis and strategic decision making. She consults on topics such as energy and societal metabolism, urban food security, social security, and community socio-ecological resilience and development. Her current work explores the creation of collaborative governance structures to systemically address societal challenges at local, national and regional levels in both the US and Latin America. She is a professor of System Dynamics, Sustainability Science and New Science Epistemologies, and Global South Thinking at the University of the Environment (UMA). She was a former Global Sustainability Fellows at The Sustainability Laboratory and a member of the Institute for Strategic Clarity-Vibrancy Community. She was also previously a part of the System Dynamics Italian Chapter, and the Systems Dynamics Group of Rome at Sapienza University of Rome. She is experienced in policy analysis, policy implementation issues and socio-ecological modeling in diverse international projects with international organizations such as ILO, UN, EU, CARE as well as with various national governments. Vanessa holds an MSc in System Dynamics from the University of Bergen, Norway and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, as well as an MBA in Strategic Decision Making from Radboud University, Netherlands. She received her BA in International Studies (Hons) and BPA in Public Administration (Hons) at the Universidad de Monterrey. She is currently pursuing the first MBA in Global Ecosynomics.

     VICTORIA HARO Law Degree from ITAM and PhD in Economics from Columbia University in New York, with a specialization in Economic Analysis of Law. Full-time professor at ITAM from 1996 to 2004. In 2004 she managed the creation of the Valle de Bravo Trust, one of the first in Mexico to gather private and public resources for the conservation of forest land. She participated in the municipal government of Valle de Bravo in 2004-2006, coordinating the elaboration of the first Urban Development Plan for the municipality. From 2006-2008 she work with the Government of the State of Mexico as Project Coordinator of the Valle de Bravo-Amanalco Basin Commission, which aims to promote and manage the environmental policies of the basin. In 2007, she co-founded the University of Environment (UMA) and is currently its academic director.

SWEDEN

    MERLINA MISSIMER: Senior Lecturer, Strategic Sustainable Development, Programme Director for the Master´s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability at Blekinge Institute of Technology ( BTH) for nearly 10 years. She enjoys creating learning environments that allow people from various backgrounds to quickly grasp essential concepts and work with them on deep, transformational levels. Her research interest focuses on the social dimension of sustainability as well as pedagogy and education for sustainable development. She has experience working as a Campus Sustainability Coordinator and Residential Programs Assistant, as well as with non-profit groups such as Friends of the Earth and Amnesty International.