Speakers & Facilitators

Wim Bartels is an accountant who has been active in sustainability since 2003. He focused for a long time on reporting and assurance for major listed companies across Europe. Since 2016 he has been a member of the Task force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and focuses further on the financial implications from climate change for companies. He currently serves as the Chair of the Sustainability Policy Group and is a member of the Sustainability Reporting Board of EFRAG. 

As an internationally recognized expert on ThriveAbility, Sustainability Context, and Online Stakeholder Engagement, Bill designs systemic transformation at global, company, and community levels. A serial entrepreneur, he’s co-founder of a number of companies and initiatives: ThriveAbility Foundation, Sustainability Context Group, Convetit and Sea Change Radio. He works with organizations across the sustainability ecosystem, including AccountAbility, Audubon, Ceres, GE, Global Compact, Harvard, UNCTAD, UNEP, Walmart, and Worldwatch Institute.

For 20 years Suzanne has co-created liberation funding and financing models with movements that shift power toward equity and wellbeing. For this panel, Suzanne will present Labs for Humanity, an initiative was brought to consciousness during the first months of the pandemic with two other tranforamtion leaders, Aissata M.B. Camara and Jeronimo Calderon. Labs for Humanity, and it’s nested exploration the Indigenous World Bank, has become a case study for the R3.0 Funding Governance Blueprint. It presents a bold and novel approach to rethinking our global systems of economy and governance through margin centered design. It creates a space of repair and liberation where forcibly hidden truths and ways of being can inform new ways ot thinking about the possibilities of our time.

Marta Ceroni is the co-director of the Academy for Systems Change, a nonprofit that supports organization- and community leaders in their capacity to shape more equitable and sustainable futures through peer learning and a focus on awareness-based systems change.

With a doctorate in forest ecology, over the years Marta has become interested in economies that prioritize communities and nature. Before her current position, Marta worked as a Research Professor for 10 years at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. She is also a writer, a dancer, and a community cultivator. Her ancestral home is in the Po River Valley, in northern Italy, her current home is on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, USA.

A passionate connector developing activities with socioenvironmental positive impact, Ana Rosa grew up in the Arc of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. She witnessed the destruction of the forest and how it is connected with land conflicts and human rights abuses. Based on her local experience, she initiated and directs the non-profit organization Meli Bees Network gUG to support vulnerable communities to lead activities for land and people to flourish.

Through his work with Chorus, Farhad is most interested in the question of how private philanthropy might play a role in putting itself out of business. Which is to say, how can the redistribution of extracted and consolidated wealth support the transition to a world in which such wealth is no longer extracted and consolidated in the first place? It is in this context that Chorus will be spending down its entire endowment by 2023.

Farhad’s family history has been defined by multiple cultures, nationalities, political revolutions, and refugee experiences. To say that his parents talked politics at home when he was growing up would be an understatement, and the experience of being a first-generation Iranian American throughout the 1980s had a profound impact on Farhad in ways that he’s still unpacking. These early experiences – combined with a lifelong love of punk and subversive art in general – have defined a political trajectory that has informed both his personal and professional outlook.

Farhad is also a musician, a lover of film and literature, and an occasional bicycle snob. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics with Computer Science, and he lives with thirteen adults and five children on Tongva land in Los Angeles.

Founder & CEO of Rumie, an education technology non-profit whose free microlearning tools make building skills fun and easy and is used in >200 countries today. Try it out for yourself: Rumie.org.

Previously BlackRock’s first-ever Chief Investment Officer of Sustainable Investing (2018-2019). Also spent a long career in investment banking, private equity investing, and building and managing investment teams and strategies.

Melanie Goodchild is an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) complexity and systems thinking scholar.  She is moose clan from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee First Nations. Melanie is currently a PHD candidate in Social & Ecological Sustainability at the University of Waterloo and is a Research Fellow with the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation & Resilience.  She is a proud member of the Iron Butt Association riding her Harley-Davidson motorcycle 1000 miles in 24 hours! Melanie is a faculty member with the Academy for Systems Change, the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning and the Presencing Institute.  She is an Advisor to the new Systems Awareness Lab at MIT.  Melanie is an alumna of the IWF Leadership Foundation’s Fellows Program (2015-16 class) sponsored by Harvard Business School and INSEAD.

Michelle Holliday is a consultant, facilitator, author and researcher. Her work centers around “thrivability” — a set of perspectives and practices based on a view of organizations and communities as dynamic, self-organizing living systems. With this understanding, we recognize that we can create the fertile conditions for life to thrive at every level – for individuals, for organizations as living ecosystems, for customers, community and biosphere. To that end, Michelle brings people together and helps them discover ways they can feel more alive, connect more meaningfully with each other, and serve life more powerfully and effectively through their collective action. In other words, she invites people into the informed intention and practice of stewarding life.

Her research, perspectives and practical experience are brought together in the highly acclaimed book, The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, as well as in a popular TEDx talk. She also publishes reflections regularly in her blog, Thoughts on Thrivability, and on social media.

With a Master’s Degree in International Marketing and a Bachelor’s Degree in Russian Studies, Michelle brings a diverse experience base to this work. She spent the first part of her career in brand strategy, working internationally for Coca-Cola and H.J. Heinz. The second part of her career focused on employee engagement, consulting for a range of organizations in Washington, DC. More recently, as part of the global Art of Hosting community of practice, she has designed and hosted hundreds of transformative conversations for clients and the public, from 5 to 500 people. Now, after living in 19 cities, including Moscow, London, Paris, New York and a small town in Scotland, she combines brand strategy, employee engagement, hosting and more in her home base of Montréal and around the world.

Nena is a young eco-feminist, who has worked across different parts of the world in the intersection of gender, environment, and equitable societies. She is a part of the Regen Foundation team and holds the title of a Project Manager. As a part of her role in the organization as well as in the larger ReFi space, she wishes to shed light on the existing inequalities in web3 community and aims to make it more inclusive and equitable space for marginalized communities.

Tjeerd Krumpelman is Global Head of Advisory, Reporting & Engagement at ABN AMRO. With more than 18 years of experience in the banking sector he started as a private banker, investment advisor and later on as Head of Investment teams. He is currently working within ABN AMRO Corporate Strategy & Sustainability department. He heads up a team that is responsible for ABN AMRO’s sustainability strategy, stakeholder management and integrated reporting. Their focus is on assessing materiality, integrated thinking and reporting, communication and engagement.

Mark W. McElroy, PhD is the creator and world’s leading practitioner of Context-Based Sustainability, a pioneering implementation of the Sustainability Context principle for measuring, managing and reporting the performance of organizations. He is also co-creator of the MultiCapital Scorecard, the world’s first context- and capital-based triple bottom line (TBL) accounting method. Dr. McElroy’s innovations in the field have influenced the development of context-based tools, methods and metrics on multiple fronts, including the Science-Based Targets initiative and SAI’s Certified TBL program, a new credential for cutting-edge accounting functions.

More recently, Dr. McElroy was appointed special advisor to the United Nations on a 4-year project to help develop a new set of context-based sustainability indicators for use by organizations around the world. He also recently unveiled an implementation of the MultiCapital Scorecard for the Doughnut Economics concept, the first context-based scorecard for use at the population or macro-economic level. He is a former KPMG partner, the Founding Director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations, and a co-founding principal of Thomas & McElroy LLC, home of the MultiCapital Scorecard.

Jennifer has been teaching yoga and meditation for over 25 years. She’s trained in Hatha, Prana, and Taoist Yoga, as has taught all ages and all levels of practice. She’s a massage therapist and is trained in Herbalism-both Chinese and Western- Non-Violent Communication, trauma recovery, emotional release therapy, and Ayurvedic health.

Ben Roberts is a process artist and network weaver who works in service to systemic transformation, inspired by large group conversation methodologies and the internet’s power to support new possibilities for dialogue, both virtually and in-person.  Much of his current work focuses on the use of such dialogic processes, in combination with new models of governance, to gather and allocate pools of money in collaborative ways.   He is a steward of the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory, the founder and lead convener of the Now What?! global gathering and gift economy, a member of the Global Council of the Regenerative Communities Network, and a founding member of that network’s Connecticut River Valley Bioregional Collaborative.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a Physicist and did her Ph.D. on the subject “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory” from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.  She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times, in close partnership with local communities and social movements.  In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. In 2004 she started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K. Dr. Shiva combines the sharp intellectual enquiry with courageous activism. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Forbes magazine in November 2010 has identified Dr. Vandana Shiva as one of the top Seven most Powerful Women on the Globe. Dr. Shiva has received honorary Doctorates from University of Paris, University of Western Ontario, University of Oslo and Connecticut College, University of Guelph. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, Global 500 Award of UN and Earth Day International Award. Lennon ONO grant for peace award by Yoko Ono in 2009, Sydney Peace Prize in 2010, Doshi Bridgebuilder Award, Calgary Peace Prize and Thomas Merton Award in the year 2011,the Fukuoka Award  and The Prism of Reason Award in 2012, the Grifone d’Argento  prize 2016 and The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity 2016, Veerangana Award 2018, The Sanctuary Wildlife Award  2018, International Environment  Summit &  Award 2018 and Amrita Devi Award 2021.

Ralph Thurm is one of the leading international experts for sustainable innovation and strategy as well as sustainability and integrated reporting. He is co-initiator, content curator and facilitator of the r3.0 Platform, worked as Director of Engagement for GISR and co-founder of the ThriveAbility Foundation. Earlier, Ralph Thurm held positions as Head of the Sustainability Strategy Council at Siemens, COO of the Global Reporting Initiative and Director of Sustainability & Innovation at Deloitte. Ralph was involved in the development of all four generations of the GRI Guidelines. Furthermore Ralph works in and supports many networks for sustainable innovation as a valued partner and is a member of various Boards and Jury’s. His blog A|HEAD|ahead is a respected source and input for many international discussions.

Allen White is Vice President and Senior Fellow at the Tellus Institute. In 1997, he co-founded the Global Reporting Initiative and served as its CEO until 2002. In 2004, he co-founded Corporation 20/20, an initiative focused on redesigning corporations to sustain social mission.  Dr. White has been engaged by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, the Pew Charitable Trusts and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the UN Foundation and numerous Fortune 500 companies. He has held faculty and research positions at the University of Connecticut, Clark University, and Battelle Laboratories, and he is a former Fulbright Scholar in Peru. He is a 2018 Medal Laureate of the Society for Progress, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

Dr. White has served on boards, advisory groups, and committees of the International Corporate Governance Network, Civic Capital, Instituto Ethos (Brazil), the New Economy Network, the Initiative for Responsible Investment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,  Business for Social Responsibility and r3.0.  He was the  principal architect of Ceres’ pioneering standardized environmental reporting framework in early 1990’s.  He has published and spoken widely on corporate redesign, governance and accountability.