MEET THE ASSOCIATES

Carsten Ohm Andersen – carsten@pioneersofchange.net

Carsten Ohm Andersen lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, with Katrine and Email. He brings creativity, confusion, courage and clarity to individuals, teams and organizations using dialogue.

Carsten offers services around dialogue using tools such as Unfolding Cards, the Flowgame, U-processes, Open Space, Circle and dialogue games tailor-made to the client. His consulting experience includes working at local, national and global level - NGOs, public and private institutions. Carsten’s formal background is a dual master degree in Learning and Business – specializing in Team Dialogue from the University of Roskilde, Denmark.

Carsten is presently the owner of and working out of Unfolding Cards (www.unfoldingcards.org)

Carsten was part of the founding group of Pioneers of Change and an active member in its chaord group. He has worked and traveled in 60+ countries, is leading a singing group in his neighborhood and enjoys books, exhibitions, people and all kinds of sport.

Mille Bojer – mbojer@pioneersofchange.net

Mille Bojer is a co-founder of Pioneers of Change and worked full-time for the Pioneers of Change community for 5 years as a member of the Cultivation Unit 1999-2003. Through her involvement with Pioneers of Change, she has engaged with innovative experiments in network-, community-, and organization-building, group process, personal transformation, and systemic change. She has coordinated and facilitated international gatherings and learning journeys on themes including sustainable development, critical education, self-governance, arts and social change, change agency, systemic change, and "changing the game".

In her capacity as a professional facilitator, she has worked with a variety of clients internationally, primarily civil society organizations, including Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, the Common Futures Forum, Civicus: The World Alliance for Citizen Participation, World Vision International, The African Network of Women with Disabilities, and the Fetzer Institute, as well as a variety of South African organizations and institutions. She is also currently participating in the creation of a Center for Social Entrepreneurship at one of South Africa's top business schools.

Born in Denmark, Mille has spent more than half her life abroad in Egypt, the United States, Burkina Faso, The Netherlands, Brazil, and South Africa, where she currently resides. Before joining Pioneers of Change, she worked with the Global Meeting of Generations in Washington DC, an international development conference which brought together 1400 people from around the world for an inter-generational dialogue around key issues of our time. She holds a dual bachelor's degree in Economics and Government with concentrations in International Relations and Africana Studies from Cornell University, and a master's degree in Political Science focusing on international development from the University of Copenhagen. Her master's degree thesis was based on seven months of fieldwork in Burkina Faso and focused on the role of multilateral development agencies in institutional capacity-building. She also writes articles and invents recipes for healthy and nutritious baking

Tatiana Glad – tatiana.glad@pioneersofchange.net

Tatiana Glad has been active in sustainability and (corporate) social responsibility work, with companies, small businesses, municipalities and community organizations, for the past 8 years. Passionate about hosting meaningful conversations that lead to meaningful action for our Selves and our Planet, she is an enthusiastic designer and facilitator of learning processes, drawing on participatory practices such as Circle, World Café, Open Space Technology, and Appreciative Inquiry. Her current work has been in exploring new ways to support change agents in organisations and social entrepreneurs in communities, building from her action research into the experiences of social change agents in multinational corporations as her thesis for a M.Sc. in Responsibility & Business Practice (University of Bath, UK), her B.Comm which combined Entrepreneurship and International Business (McGill University, Montreal), and her earlier work as an internal change consultant in Citibank leading strategy implementation and cross-functional process improvement initiatives, while considering the social and environmental dimensions. She is inspired by nature and what we can learn from our natural world to provide more rooted and integral ways of learning and embracing change, given the complexity of issues we face in our global sphere, and is a trained facilitator of the FlowGame.

Presently a partner of Engage! InterAct (www.engage.nu/interact), co-founder of Waterlution - A Water Learning Experience (www.waterlution.org), and steering team member of Be The Change (www.bethechange.org.uk), Tatiana previously held a programme development role in the Cultivation Unit of Pioneers of Change supporting pioneers in developing and facilitating learning journeys and initiating local learning networks. Tatiana is actively involved in her community and has lived and worked in various countries over the past 10 years; she currently divides her time between The Netherlands and Canada.

Alexander Grashow – alexander@pioneersofchange.net

Alexander Grashow is an organizational and leadership development consultant specializing in whole system change, innovation and efficacy. His work as trainer, facilitator, coach and curriculum designer focuses on issues of organizational and personal adaptation, development of collaborative teams, communities of practice, deep alignment with strategic purpose, personal reflection and inquiry and collective celebration.

Alexander's consulting practice has developing customized leadership services for individuals, organizations and networks. These programs have been implemented for corporate executives, government officials, social activists, academic leaders, and community organizers artists across four continents.

In addition to his consulting practice, Alexander is the Director of Associates at Cambridge Leadership Associates LLC. Cambridge Leadership Associates LLC is a leadership consulting practice formed in 2002 after the publication of “Leadership on the Line” by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky. CLA works with large-scale organizations invested in developing organizational capacity to survive and thrive in complex and changing circumstances. Alexander oversees the design and content of CLA training programs and organizational change practices.

From 1999-2003, Alexander was at The Synergos Institute as Co-Founder and Director of the Bridging Leadership Program which worked in partnership in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the US to develop collaborations across sectors. This work developed training, research and communities of practice amongst international businesses, business schools and national non-profits.

Alexander is a native New Yorker. He has also lived in India, Africa and has spent nearly half his professional live working in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America. Alexander's wife is Japanese and they frequently travel between NY and Japan. Alexander has studied Japanese Woodblock printing and painting and is a practicing artist.

Zaid Hassan – zaid@pioneersofchange.net

A writer and a bridge-builder, Zaid currently work at at Generon Consulting where he is responsible for accelerating learning across Generon's projects. He does this through documenting existing processes and then incorporating lessons into the on-going design of new projects. His main focus is on the design of Generon's Change Labs -- multi-stakeholder, multi-year projects which aim to shift seemingly stuck social problems. He writes and edits various articles to develop deeper understandings of Generon's work and processes.

Zaid is a native Londoner (England), who has lived half his life abroad, in Bombay, New Delhi, and Abu Dhabi (the United Arab Emirates). Since October 1999 he has been working closely with Pioneers of Change, an international learning community of change agents committed to systemic change. Prior to Generon, Zaid spent two years working for Pioneers of Change focusing on communication and the documentation of learning in diverse groups. He is actively involved in the Chaord Group, which is the decision making body within Pioneers and is also an Associate of the network.

Zaid's working career started in the communications and new media sector where he worked out the heady years of the .com boom as a project manager. He was Chief Technology Officer (and Chief Actualisation Officer) at Smartchange, a non-profit start-up that aimed to revolutionize the non-profit section by connecting small non-profits to payroll giving and volunteering programmes within large corporations. He spent a year working for a large US based, NASDAQ listed web consultancy. Prior to that Zaid set-up a company, Anthropic, as a commercial vehicle for his project work, which he ran for two years. Clients over the years included blue-chips such as IBM and Shell, as well as public sector organizations such as the London Mayor’s office and many start-ups.

A regular contributor to worldchanging.com, Zaid has recently written essays on the global food system, he has reported on politics and democracy from Brazil, Egypt, India and South Africa, as well as on a number of other issues ranging across the spectrum from culture, politics, education and social change. He also writes for Shikshantar, an Indian Institute concerned with re-thinking education and development. Zaid is currently working on a book about active responses to the growing phenomenon of cultural destruction.

Zaid is a member of the Hub (http://www.the-hub.net/), an innovative social incubator. He works from there when in London.

Satu Kreula — satu@pioneersofchange.net

Satu Kreula is an experienced coach and facilitator working with professionals who are already successful and yet who feel their work lacks meaning and fulfillment. If you feel you aren’t using your potential and are seeking ways to do so, Satu is the coach for you! She also works with people who want to develop an international career and want to increase their intercultural sensitivity and competence – whether as expats or trailing spouses or independently. She has holds a MSc in Organizational Behavior and Intercultural Communication, and is a graduate of CoachU.

She has worked both in the private (Nokia and Celemi International among others) and not-for-profit (Raleigh International, Pioneers of Change, AIESEC) sectors. She is a member of the International Coach Federation and SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research). Satu is truly multicultural, she has lived in 7 countries and worked in 35 countries on 6 continents and travelled in another 30. She currently resides in London, and works as a freelancer. She is an associate with Pioneers of Change (www.pioneersofchange.net), Future Considerations (www.futureconsiderations) and M Bonde Consulting (www.mbondeconsulting.co.uk) and can be found at www.satukreula.com

Marianne Knuth – marianne@pioneersofchange.net

Marianne Knuth is the director of a learning centre in Zimbabwe, Kufunda Village (www.kufunda.org). Kufunda is a learning village dedicated to creating locally rooted solutions to the challenges of community self-reliance, through the use of people’s own imagination and creativity. Kufunda Village runs residential programs for rural community organizers around developing healthy and sustainable community.

Marianne additionally works as an independent facilitator and consultant in the areas of individual and group learning processes, and leadership development. In this arena she has organized several facilitation workshops (the Art of Hosting), and offers team building and organization development retreats. Over the past three years she has been part of the faculty of the Shambhala Institute (www.shambhala.org) where she has co-facilitated the module on Convening Strategic Conversations with Toke Moeller. This year she is part of the core organizing team for the Institute. She has recently joined a team that is developing the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in South Africa.

Prior to Kufunda Village, Marianne co-founded Pioneers of Change (www.pioneersofchange.net), a global learning community of committed change agents who come together to connect with their deeper values and ideals, and to generate innovative solutions to challenges faced by their organizations and communities. During her time with Pioneers of Change, she additionally co-ordinated the involvement of African leaders to the global intergenerational leadership initiative From the Four Directions (www.fromthefourdirections.org) which was initiated by the Berkana Institute in the US.

Marianne holds an M.Sc from the Business School of Copenhagen.

Sean Legassick – sean@pioneersofchange.net

Sean Legassick is originally from the UK and has lived in Cape Town, South Africa for the last four years. He has worked as a software developer for over ten years, now working for himself creating web-based solutions from conception to deployment. He has a deep commitment to Free (or "open source") Software and and a passion for collaborative processes and methodologies. He also writes and presents talks around the factors that contribute to healthy collabporative communities.

Previous software projects include a web-based share dealing system for Winterflood Securities, a London-based trading firm; a web-based statistical analysis package for the retail sector; implementation and management of the content management system that serves the Pioneers of Change network website; co-developer of the Apache Turbine framework for building Java web applications; contributor to miscellaneous other Free Software projects.

In other realms Sean established the Pioneers of Change local network in Cape Town; spoke at the Idlelo digital commons conference in Cape Town 2004; and writes for his blog at http://informage.net.

Colleen Magner – cbowker@pioneersofchange.net

Colleen Magner lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Over the past five years, Colleen has worked with businesses and NGOs in leadership and strategy training and facilitation, and currently works for the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), where she has been responsible for setting up and leading a leadership network called Nexus, consisting of top young people in leadership capacities. Nexus aims to develop relationships across diversity, and to build understanding of the complex socio-economic issues affecting South Africa's institutions. Colleen is currently managing the Centre for Policy, Leadership and Gender at GIBS, headed up by Professor Gill Marcus.

Previously, Colleen served as the national President of AIESEC South Africa, where she worked with corporate partners to involve students in community issues. During her term as a Director of AIESEC International in Brussels, she was responsible for implementing the Corporate Social Responsibility program for AIESEC International, and worked in New York for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Human Resources to set up a national community involvement programme for the financial services firm. Her work at PwC included diversity recruiting during this period.

Six years ago, Colleen co-founded Pioneers of Change (www.pioneersofchange.net), a global network which now spans more than 70 countries around the world, involving 2000 people in its programmes and activities.

Colleen’s facilitation work includes working at various national, sub-regional and international levels with World Vision, SOS Children’s Villages, Save the Children, Business Women’s Association, a selected group of environmental organizations involved in the WSSD Johannesburg 2002, Academic departments including the WITS University School of Humanities and WITS Department of Engineering, and a range of consulting groups in South Africa.

Colleen graduated from the University of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with a dual degree in Law and Economics, and is currently completing a master’s degree in Organizational Change and Knowledge Management from the University of Kwa Zulu Natal.

Tim Merry – tim@pioneersofchange.net

Tim Merry is the Founder and Partner of the Shire, a learning center in Nova Scotia, Canada and a Host and Convener of Conversations that Matter. Tim is committed to creating new ways of working, being and living. His passion lies in creating spaces where human beings can be authentic, talk about what matters and take responsibility in terms of action.

For years, Tim has been organizing, designing, and hosting inspired spaces – dialogues, strategic change processes, learning conferences, circle councils, networked organizations, communities of practice, conflict transformation, community building, coaching heroes in business – each in support of life-affirming leadership, collaborative learning, organizational and social change and self-organization.

Core questions in Tim’s works are “How can our leaders remain connected to their integrity in an increasingly chaotic, fast paced and diverse world? What if the solutions for our future were hidden in our collective intelligence and wisdom?”

Check Tim's Website for more information www.timmerry.com

Dumisani Nyoni – dumisani@pioneersofchange.net

Dumisani Nyoni works on the coordinating team of Pioneers of Change and studies organizational psychology and management at Cambridge College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has wide reaching experiences in coordinating global youth networks, facilitating workshops and organizing multi-stakeholder conferences and forums. Dumisani has also extensively advised and consulted with a wide range of organizations on strategy development, team building and the inclusion and participation of youth in programs and processes.

His work experience includes working with the Earth Council in San Jose Costa Rica to launch the youth component of the international Earth Charter Initiative, a global looking at shifting the approach to sustainable development from uniquely a programmatic and legal one to one rooted in people’s behavior, lifestyle, values and principles.

Dumisani has also worked as a Youth Coordinator at the Youth Employment Summit (YES) Campaign, where he helped to organize the first global summit on Youth Employment held in Alexandria, Egypt in September 2002, and to establish YES Country Networks in over 70 countries which are youth-led multi-stakeholder coalitions bringing together governments, civil society and business into a dialogue on the issue of youth employment. He has experiences working with governments, NGOs, development agencies, business organizations and academic institutions

An inspirational and motivational speaker, Dumisani has spoken and presented at events and conferences around the world including the Youth Employment Summit in Alexandria, Egypt, the Harvard International Development Conference at Harvard University, as well as facilitating numerous workshop and forums internationally covering a wide ranges of themes. He also serves as an advisor and board member to innovative organizations globally working on a wide range of issues.

Anthony Prangley – anthony@pioneersofchange.net

Anthony Prangley graduated from Wits University, Johannesburg with a BSc Honours in Geography and later studied Anthropology in Colombia. He initially worked in public participation on large government projects in Mozambique and Swaziland. He then co-founded a small NGO (www.gumboots.org.za) to connect South Africans overseas with positive change at home.

He is currently working with the Gordon Institute of Business Science hosting dialogue on improved action to bridge the economic divide (www.gibs.co.za/imagination).

He designs and develops issue-focused learning journeys to tap into the hidden knowledge of the township. He also facilitates Gumboot Dancing (www.gumboot.tk) workshops to team build and connect with the African within.

Recent clients include the Harvard Womens Leadership Board, SC Johnson and Pick 'n Pay (a large African supermarket chain).

Dania Quirola Suarez – dania@pioneersofchange.net

Dania Quirola is a sustainability practitioner based in Ecuador. Her academic background is in economics specialized in sustainable development and holds a Masters of Sciences from the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (www.iiiee.org) at Lund University.

She acts a coordinator for the DGIS-WWF project "Poverty Reduction through Improved Natural Resources Management in the Pastaza River Basin" dealing with integrated river basin management, sustainable livelihoods, economic valuation, capacity building at multi-level scale and cross-project learning in one of the most important rivers in the Amazon Basin in a binational effort with Peru.

She has particular talents acting as a bridge between diverse stakeholders based on her experience working with international NGOs, national government, business and volunteer organizations in innovative learning and content facilitation processes in Latin America and Europe. She is a guest lecturer in several universities.

Dania has been a part of Pioneers of Change since 2000 and a partner in the Latin-American based organization Asraiz dealing with monitoring and capacity building practices for sustainability. She is dedicated to promote and create integrated sustainable alternatives with consistency and integrity.

Ole Qvist-Sørensen – ole@pioneersofchange.net

Ole Qvist-Sørensen is a process consultant, graphic facilitator and illustrator. Ole holds a masters degree in Learning and Business Studies from Roskilde University (www.ruc.dk) and a degree from the creative entrepreneurship education The Kaospilot University (www.kaospilot.dk). Since 1998 Ole has worked with group learning and visualisation. One year later, 1999, Ole joined Pioneers of Change.

In 2003 - together with two others - Ole started Bigger Picture. Bigger Picture provides visual learning and dialogue tools, training and consulting services enabling ongoing sustainable organizational and personal change.

A “bigger picture” creates meaning, furthers dialogue, enables leadership and supports collective understanding, learning and action. Bigger Picture aims to make this happen in a sustainable, engaging and democratic way. The principles, methods and tools used are known to be inspirational in their design and easy to understand, use and teach in multicultural settings.

Through collaboration with multinationals, NGOs and governmental bodies working in the international arena, Bigger Pictures vision is to support people and organizations in emerging markets and third world countries creating sustainable change.

Bigger Picture has collaborated with organizations such as Merck, ABN Amro Bank, the Danish Ministry of the Interior and Health, the Shambhala Institute, Companies House, the Danish Red Cross, The Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs and Novo Nordisk Service Partner.

You can read more about Bigger Picture at www.biggerpicture.dk

Alok Singh – alok@pioneersofchange.net

Alok Singh is a process consultant and facilitator living in the UK. He specialises in working with organisations committed to sustainable development or the delivery of social services, which tend to involve a wide array of stakeholders and complex systems of decision making. His current work includes: • Bringing a focus on employee involvement and behavioural change to the work of The Carbon Trust, a government funded body that engages UK industry to reduce its carbon footprint; • Facilitating the integration of services provided to children with autism in the London borough of Southwark, and, simultaneously, the creation of a parents council to provide constructive feedback to the service providers; • Designing, running and documenting a multi-stakeholder evaluation of a corporate community investment project initiated by BSkyB.

In his earlier work as Manager, Business Leadership and Strategy at the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum, Alok led an initiative to develop leadership capacities for socially responsible business, collaborating with companies including 3M, GlaxoSmithKline, Morgan Stanley, Nestlé, Norsk Hydro and Thames Water International. He has also worked as global facilitator of Pioneers of Change - an international community of social entrepreneurs and social activists, where he organised and ran learning programmes around the world - and as a human resources consultant for Accenture.

Alok has trained in several change and group process methodologies, including: the U-process, Constellations, Circle, Open Space Technology, World Café and Deep Democracy. He holds a Bachelors degree from Warwick Business School, and will complete a part-time Masters degree in Participation, Development and Social Change at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University in July 2005.

Alok works ‘freelance’ and as an associate of Future Considerations, Pioneers of Change, the Global Leadership Network and 14a Conversations

Sera Thompson – sera@pioneersofchange.net

Sera Thompson is a Canadian, and an American living in Johannesburg. She is a facilitator of collaborative learning and innovative approaches to organizational living. Sera is currently coordinating the Pioneers of Change global network of young visionaries.

Her work has been in environmental management, community development and individual transformation. She is a trained host of The Flow Game, a Danish board game which facilitates peer-coaching and the increase of flow in ones life. Sera is also teaches meditation in the Shambhala Tradition, an international community of meditation centers based on the Tibetan-Buddhist tradition www.shambhala.org

Nick Wilding – nick@pioneersofchange.net

Nick Wilding’s professional practice is as a leadership, complexity and change facilitator. His work bridges public, private, NGO and academic sectors. Recent projects include consultancy to UK local government on democratisation of local political process; strategic development of the black/minority ethnic capacity across Scotland; catalysing sustainable local food projects across Fife, Scotland (where he lives); and designing/facilitating Masters accredited integral leadership programmes offered by Edinburgh's Independent Centre for Human Ecology (which he co-founded in 1996). CHE has successfully gained institutional accreditation to offer a unique ‘head, hand and heart’ Masters Degree for 15-18 students every year (www.che.ac.uk)

Nick is consciously grounded in technologies of change and facilitation that are usually separated by sectoral boundaries. These include Participatory Appraisal, Training for Transformation (one of a family of popular education praxis inspired by Paulo Freire’s liberation theology), Open Space, Future Search, World Café, and Process Psychology. Action Research and Integral Inquiry. His work is currently evolving a focus on Integral Sustainability and Ecology drawing on the theory of Ken Wilber and Spiral Dynamics (Clare Graves/Don Beck). Nick also a doctoral student in action research at Bath University Management School’s Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARRP).

Nick lives in rural Fife, Scotland, in a wood by a stream with enough space to play fiddle and guitar to his heart's content. See Nick's website www.nickwilding.com

Alenka Zavasnik – alenka@pioneersofchange.net

Alenka Zavasnik lives in Slovenia where she works with Novelus (www.novelus.org), an organization she co-founded a year ago with the purpose of enhancing learning and cooperation within organizations and sectors of society.

Her work includes facilitating and designing processes where individuals, organizations and networks together explore and create new ways of addressing issues that are important to them. She specialises in engaging participants in meeting processes where knowledge, experience, and intuition are shared in a collective effort.

Her current work includes a 3-year project funded by the EU (The EQUAL Initiative) on exploring and developing innovative approaches and programmes for youth/with special needs for increasing their employability. She also continues facilitating different processes for business and NGOs. Examples include planning for a project group of 12 partners; an annual conference of the youth department within the Ministry of Education; organizing a strategic retreat for a media company; facilitating teamwork workshops for a financial newspaper; putting together a conferences of HR managers in Serbia.

Alenka has worked as a freelance host, facilitator and organizer of projects with various organizations and networks such as the “Art of Hosting and Convening meaningful Conversations” a training that has been offered in Europe, North America and Africa by a network of hosts. She has also worked with programme managers for the EU funded (PHARE 2000 grant scheme) project, “getWork “in Savinjska region. Her work included working with trainers, development of programmes and other activities for raising youth employability. Alenka is also the co-founder and facilitator of Horizon, a Croatian educational institution working with individual and organizational transformation.

Alenka has lived in Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Serbia and has travelled in 20 countries. International experiences have influenced her understanding beauty and the gifts of diversity and hopes to continue learning through contributing to others.

Pamela Paquin – pamela@gmail.com

Pamela hosts working groups that build capacity in organizations for resilient, adaptive, and productive change. Her work is based on the assumption that "change happens", and it is best to be ready and skilled at working with it. Fundamental to this work is the understanding that tension can be a good thing ---it means we are learning--- and learning organizations are one's that last.

The knowledge of adaptive change is typically already available in the organization. Pamela helps ln creating and sustaining a respectful, challenging environment for those ideas to emerge and take root. As a host, researcher, and facilitator at The Society for Organizational Learning's European Sustainability Group, Pioneers of Change, and The Falkland Centre for Stewardship she has partnered with people from multi-national organizations, to local community groups.

Pamela has been hosting workshops and conferences for over a decade in both Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Participant size has ranged from 5 to 1000, and while methodologies may change, the focus on co-creation and tapping into the collective intellgence of the group lies as the centre of design. Designing a conference or workshop first and foremost is an exercise in chaordic balance. There should be enough of a flow and structure to give participants something to bite into and sharpen their own learning edge, while at the same time providing a flexible creative space for them to bring their own contributions to bear.