Alexis Goggans

Alexis Goggans, PCC is an equitable decarbonization and organizational development consultant, a trusted instructor, and an accredited life, leadership, and executive coach. She’s the mind behind Be Bold Services, a small consulting firm that has been helping individuals and organizations implement climate, sustainability, and social change initiatives rooted in deep equity since 2018. Alexis is also co-founder of the Institute for Coaching Excellence, an online training program that provides aspiring professionals with a certificate in Life, Leadership, and Executive Coaching.

Namrata (Nnaumrata) Arora

DEIB Consultant, Circle Convenor, Community Weaver, Certified Professional Coach, Workshop Leader, Writer, Changemaker, International Speaker, Systems Thinking Researcher and mom, Nnaumrata is the Founder of Enactive Systems (earlier Life Beyond Motherhood) and Zemyna Foundation, the Founding Director and Global Board Member for SCiO in India (Systems and Complexity in Organisations) and an empaneled Women’s Leadership coach with Heidrick and Struggles.

Laura Kaestele

Laura Kaestele is a network weaver, designer, facilitator, project coordinator, and grower focusing on integrative design, ecological regeneration, community and network development, permaculture, and holistic living with 10+ years of practical experience in the eco-social field. Together with colleagues from ECOLISE she works to cultivate a thriving impact network of community-led initiatives for climate change and sustainability in Europe guided by nature’s principles, relationship building, and collaborative processes.

Jane Wei-Skillern

Jane Wei-Skillern is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Social Sector Leadership at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she has served on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School (HBS), and London Business School. She has studied and published extensively on nonprofit networks for more than two decades.  She is the author and coauthor of dozens of HBS and Haas UC Berkeley case studies, book chapters, and journal articles and is the lead author of the casebook, Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector (Sage Publications, 2007). 

Dr. Froswa’ Booker-Drew

Froswa’ Booker-Drew, Ph.D. is a Network Weaver who believes relationships are the key to our personal, professional, and organizational growth. She has been quoted/featured in Forbes, Ozy, Bustle, Huffington Post, Modern Luxury, and other media outlets, due to an extensive background in leadership, nonprofit management, philanthropy, partnership development, training, and education. She is the CEO of Soulstice Consultancy, LLC providing DEI, leadership training, community engagement strategies and philanthropic/partnership guidance for institutions and the CEO of R2 Foundation (Restoration and Reconciliation Foundation) providing support for Black led nonprofits. Formerly the Vice President of Community Affairs for the State Fair of Texas, Froswa’ was responsible for grantmaking, educational programming and community initiatives. More than 70% of organizations funded were led by people of color.  As the previous National Community Engagement Director for World Vision, she served as a catalyst, partnership broker, and builder of the capacity of local partners in multiple locations across the US to improve and sustain the well-being of children and their families.  She is also co-founder of HERitage Giving Circle, one of the first Black women Giving Circles in the state of Texas and co-founder of both Power in Action-Dallas and the South Dallas Employment Project. 

Courageous Change Collective

Nou Yang, Sindy Morales Garcia and Kirsten Johnson are Courageous Change Collective, a Minnesota based organization committed to growing communities of love and justice through transformative facilitation. Through the work of Courageous Change Collective we seek to cultivate, support and sustain the conditions needed for reflection, growth and transformation. We are a three-woman team shaped by our identities as immigrant, LGBTQ, Indigenous, People of Color.

Clemens Binder

Clemens Binder is part of Unity Effect as the lead for Networks & Communities. His mission is to hold spaces, build bridges and inspire people to realise what makes them come alive. He’s also passionate about networks, agile prototyping and social innovation.

In 2015, Clemens co-founded an incubator for early-stage social start-ups and accompanied many founders as a coach. Since then, he has been fascinated by social entrepreneurship (education) and bringing positive change into the world.

Jannik Kaiser

Jannik Kaiser is co-founder of Unity Effect, where he is leading the area of Systemic Impact. His desire to co-create systemic social change led him down the rabbit holes of complexity science, human sense-making (e.g. phenomenology), asking big questions (just ask “why” often enough…) and personal healing. Having worked in the NGO sector, academia and now social entrepreneurship, his most formational professional experiences were: 

Sadia Hassan

Sadia Hassan is an award winning writer, equity consultant and network weaver who enjoys using a human-centered approach to crafting inclusive, equitable, and participatory processes for capacity building. Her skills include: leadership development training using Public Narrative, facilitation, coaching, cultural strategy, program management and workshop design.

Evan Welkin

Evan Welkin is a network ecosystem designer, focusing especially on high context community, social and ecological justice.  As a child of the intentional community movement, he has lived and supported networks for communities seeking to build social, ecological, cultural and economic regeneration.  He is completing an Ecological Design Thinking MA at Schumacher College in Devon, UK, and is cofounder of Borgo Basino folk school, ecovillage and ecotourism farm in Italy: borgobasino.org

Naava L. Frank, Ed.D.

Naava L. Frank, Ed.D. is a nationally recognized, published expert, with 20 years of experience in the use of communities of practice (CoPs) and networks for non-profits. Naava consults to foundations and nonprofit organizations to launch and support the growth of communities of practice and networks. Her expertise in designing and implementing network evaluation to measure outcomes allows her to maximize the strategic impact for her clients.

Knowledge Communities helps foundations and nonprofits build their capacity to launch and support the growth of networks and communities of practice (CoPs). CoPs use systematic knowledge sharing to focus on improving professional practice.

Kevin Hiebert

Kevin Hiebert, Principal of Resonate Consulting, is a facilitator, trainer, leadership coach and strategy consultant who supports collaboration to create social and organizational change.  Kevin is passionate about collaboration, participatory leadership and seeing collective wisdom and action emerge.  For the past 20 years Kevin has been working with people, teams and organizations to take the next steps of growth, collaboration and action.  

www.resonatenw.com

email: kevin@resonatenw.com

Thea LaGrou

By identifying story threads and patterns we weave the world around us. Not only do our stories connect us – they define our perceptions and shape our behavior. Stories frame our future.

Fascinated by systems architecture and the stories that network mapping conveys, Thea applies her experience as a cross-disciplinary “creative entrepreneur” to network communications, digital storytelling, systems analysis and sense-making. Weaving between diverse networks, she creates virtual learning journeys, presentations on the concept and value of social system mapping, and evaluates network weaving approaches, resources, and tools to enhance network cultures and the discovery of emerging trends. Driven by curiosity and imagination, she supports clients seeking creative opportunities to expand their network’s potential.

MaryAnn Martinez

MaryAnn Martinez is a non-profit director and interdisciplinary food systems scholar, currently a PhD candidate at Antioch Graduate School of Leadership and Change. MaryAnn’s current academic research is focused on an emergent hunger prevention network during Covid-19. In addition, MaryAnn also brings years of expertise as a consultant for non-profit and local government around childhood nutrition, substance abuse prevention, and other social issues, as well as practical experience as a vegetable and livestock farmer, in both for-profit and social enterprises.

MaryAnn’s primary consultation focus is on network and social system mapping of people, communities and ideas to ignite discussion around issues of local and regional food systems, food insecurity, food justice and equity.

When MaryAnn is not engaged in growing food and networks she can usually be found running in the woods, playing scrabble, or hanging out with family, friends, and pets.

exdir@communityfoodinitiatives.org

Kimberley Jutze

Kimberley Jutze is the founder of Shifting Patterns Consulting, a Certified B Corporation that helps changemaker leaders get their colleagues on the same page and put collaborative processes in place to achieve greater impact.  Her company applies organizational and human systems processes that enable organizations collaborating at the intersection of social, economic, and environmental justice solve problems that prevent people from working well together in ways that stay solved.  This involves pinpointing the underlying causes of poor performance and unhealthy conflict, building the commitment to take effective action, supporting people in coming up with their own solutions, and putting a support system in place to monitor improved performance.

Bianca Campbell

Bianca Campbell (they/she) is the Movement Building Senior Manager at Forward Together. She has worked in reproductive justice work since 2011 with organizations like SPARK Reproductive Justice Now! and the National Network of Abortion Funds. She has also been a doula for births, abortions and personal transformations.  Now, she is a weaver of the Strong Families Network, centered on family recognition and definition through a cultural strategy. She also shares her commitment to holistic mind and body wellness through her coaching via Spektra Wellness.

bianca@forwardtogether.org

Sahana Chattopadhyay

Sahana Chattopadhyay is a global Speaker, Writer, Master Facilitator, Organization Development Consultant, and Coach. She works at the intersection of Complexity, Human Potential, Organizational Transformation, Systems Thinking, and Emergence. Her passion is to enable organizations to develop the capacities, skills, and mindsets to become “thrivable” in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.

The core of her work has been to build a culture of transformative learning and collaboration in distributed and fluid organizations across diverse global cultures. At present, she synthesizes her experiences to help build capacities for Regenerative Leadership, design spaces for Emergent Learning, and communities for Generative Conversations through Facilitated Dialogues, Workshops, Master Classes, Consulting, and Coaching. 

Ben Roberts

I am a systemic change agent and a process artist.  Since March 2009, when I began leading a local weekly “Discussion Salon,” I have been convening and hosting both in-person and virtual conversations on a regular basis, in service to initiatives for change.

I specialize in making virtual events come alive, either as stand-alone engagements or in conjunction with in-person gatherings. I have extensive experience adapting large group conversational processes such as World Cafe, Open Space Technology and Appreciative Inquiry to the virtual realm, as well as integrating in-person and virtual formats within a single conversation, gathering or engagement.  I use these processes to support collaboration, build communities of practice and purpose, and to host large scale conversations in service to the work being done across multiple dimensions of global systemic transformation.

Amy C Moritz

My most satisfying consulting moments happen when I am facilitating a group of people to bring a vision of social change to reality.   Every engagement is unique because every group is driven by their specific passion for equity and social justice. 

Every group has a distinct set of skills and resources from which to innovate for their unique community.  I am grateful for those who do not let the complexity of the social challenges that confront us limit what they believe is possible. 

Ammie Kae Brooks

Ammie Kae, co-founder of Fluff, a digital marketing startup, is a licensed Social Worker and Clinical Therapist in the Chicagoland area. She currently sees clients both one-on-one and in group settings for therapy, and works as a Lead Designer and Brand Strategist: digitally growing small businesses. Additionally, Ammie Kae is certified at the Masters level in Nonprofit Administration.

She has worked with organizations, such as Goodwill and the Department of Education’s Title IX Office to write curriculum, implement and evaluate programming, as well as complete data analysis to make applicable recommendations for the future. 

Dolores Chandler

Dolores Chandler (they/them) is a radical community based social worker with over 10 years of experience as a facilitator, trainer, performer, writer, and angelic trouble maker. They entered into this work through drag kinging and gender performance which led them to community organizing. Dolores approaches their work through a violence prevention lens, as well as a racial and gender justice lens.

Professionally, they have worked in sexual violence prevention education and supporting LGBTQ and POC youth leadership development. Dolores works with organizations to achieve their missions by centering racial and gender equity and building compassionate community. Their services include equity coaching, facilitation, and training with a focus on analyzing power dynamics and dismantling white supremacy culture in groups and organizations.

Tamara Shapiro

Tamara Shapiro was a lead strategist and facilitator of the InterOccupy network which facilitated democratic, interactive conference calls that led to regional and national actions, conferences and multi-city events.  She was one of the lead coordinators of Occupy Sandy, the most effective citizen-led relief effort in U.S. history.  

Katy Mamen

Katy’s practice focuses primarily on network and social system mapping, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and systems-informed strategy as key avenues for transformative systems change that strengthens social justice and ecological health. As a facilitator, systems thinker, and content expert in the fields of water, food and farming, and climate change, Katy supports leaders, organizations, and collaboratives in navigating complexity to develop adaptive strategies that address the root causes of social and environmental problems.

Katy is a Fellow of the Academy for Systems Change, Senior Partner at Ag Innovations, and volunteers on several projects advancing healthy, just, and regenerative food systems. She holds a Masters in Holistic Science (with Distinction) from Schumacher College in the UK and a BSc (Honours, First Class) in Physical Geography from McGill University in Montreal. Katy lives in a land-based intentional community in Northern California, where she has honed her consensus decision-making skills over the past 15 years. 

Lisa Trocchia

Dr. Lisa Trocchia is Associate Faculty in the Sustainable Food Systems graduate program at Prescott College. She is also a network facilitator and consultant offering support in network communication and design, self-organizing, horizontal leadership, and visual storytelling. Lisa holds an interdisciplinary PhD in the Social Ecology of Food. She explores food-based social ecosystems from multiple perspectives, including Communication Studies, Sociology, Political Theory, and the study of networks and complex adaptive systems. Dr. Trocchia is a sensory ethnographer. She researches and writes about the performance of cultural foodways, food and the transmission of affect, and she examines the social ecologies of community-based food systems as sites of participatory and transformative change.

Shakira Hall Louimarre

Shakira Hall Louimarre is a chaplain, higher education administrator and facilitator, committed to developing and cultivating relationships. She connects people, communities and ideas around issues of justice and equity.

Shakira most recently served as CPE chaplain at the RSMC Women’s Correctional Facility at Rikers Island, as well as the Fortune Society re-entry program. Her guiding principles include an attitude of curiosity in the face of challenges and conflict, collaborative and non-hierarchical models of leadership and approaching difference and diversity as a springboard of creative action.

Jamye Wooten

Jamye Wooten is a Digital Communications & Social Impact Strategist, Human Rights Organizer and Founder of KINETICS.

On the forefront of digital strategy, his work has spanned the globe – advising nonprofits, faith-based organizations, corporations and individuals in their efforts to engage their constituencies.  

In January 2019 Wooten launched CLLCTIVLY, creating an ecosystem to foster collaboration, increase social impact and amplify the voices of Black-led organizations in Greater Baltimore. Wooten is the creator of the #BlackChurchSyllabus #MLK2BAKER and in 2017, launched the Black Theology Project 2.0, a knowledge base system curating theological resources for Black Lives. (TheologyforBlackLives.org).

Emily Carroll

Dr. Emily Carroll is the President and Managing Partner of Janus Analytics, LLC. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in Public Policy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, her MSHS in Public Health from Touro University (California), her MA in Political Science from the University of Akron (Ohio), and her BA in Women’s Studies with a minor in Psychology from Bowling Green State University (Ohio).

During her doctoral program, she worked on several assignments related to government, politics, and public policy for Southern Illinois University as a graduate research and teaching assistant and for the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute as the inaugural Graduate Research Fellow.

Sami Berger

Sami’s practice focuses on developing and implementing learning strategies within networks, collaborative initiatives, government agencies, and non-profit organizations that are striving to make a positive difference in their communities. Since 2013, she has supported them with their evaluation and research needs.

Her current work includes conducting developmental evaluation, qualitative research (including using social network analysis to visualize the networks that she works with), and capacity building to help her clients understand how, why and whether they are making progress.

Blythe Butler

My work is dedicated to building adaptive capacity in individuals, organizations and communities. My approach is rooted in organizational change, network science, strategy development, evaluation & learning methodologies.

I have a broad and diverse background in strategic planning, change management, developmental evaluation, facilitation and organizational development.  Over the past 20 years I have worked in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, consulting with clients in a variety of topics ranging from ISO Quality Management, Process Safety Culture, Corporate Social Responsibility to supporting clients working on social change in the areas of Homelessness, Youth Mental Health, Natural Supports, Early Childhood Development, Climate Change & Environmental Regeneration, Domestic Violence and Collaborative Governance.

For more than a decade I have contributed to the development, design and delivery of the Human Venture Institute and Human Venture Leadership programs (formerly Leadership Calgary). My contributions to this community have deeply impacted my approach to work and life.

Current and past community contributions include: Board Member of the Human Venture Institute (current), Board Member of Bolivia Kids (current); Board Member of Wildwood Playschool (current) past chair of the Leadership Calgary Program Committee and a past Board Member for Volunteer Calgary (now Propellus). In 2008, I was fortunate to be named to Calgary’s ‘Top 40 Under 40’. I hold a BComm in Finance and International Development from the University of Alberta, have studied Journalism at Carleton University, Design Marketing at Parsons in New York City and worked as a Page for the Canadian House of Commons.

I live on Treaty 7 lands, the traditional territory of the Nitsatapi, Tsuu T’ina and Stoney Nakoda Nations, and part of Metis Region 3 with my husband and my two children. 

“Strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements – is, I would argue, the most pressing task anyone concerned with social and economic justice.”

– Naomi Klein

contact Blythe: blythe@shaw.ca

Matt Birkhold

Matt Birkhold is founder of Visionary Organizing Lab, an educational laboratory that supports people to experiment with building new economic practices, building beloved communities, and developing a sense of themselves as creators of history. Matt’s work focuses on the relationships between issues, people, and processes, the way those relationships shape individual people, and the way they constitute a larger system.

Connecting people with their creative capacity to shape the world, his work fosters organizing around critical connections at sites of interdependence and facilitates personal, social, political, and economic transformations.

By creating processes where people come to recognize the interdependent nature of the world, his work creates space for people to recognize the contributions they make to the world and make them intentionally.

Ulises Aguila

I am passionate about Networks, as a way to help others to become leaders, as the option to create fastest initiatives in social systems, as an alternative to do things that really matter to us and are deep aligned to our purpose, as an organic adaptive way of ‘descaling’ and as the solution to build ecosystems of innovation to solve the greatest human challenges.

We need to become more aware of our power of collaboration and experiment together with better self awareness as collaborative teams, as a common consciousness, as organizations, as networks and as leadership that helps others to become better versions of themselves by helping others to work on things that really matter to them.

My objective is to be part of this new technological and management wave to really focus on our deepest social problems and create break-through value solutions through Networks and ecosystems.

Denisha Craig

Denisha Craig is a child sex abuse prevention advocate and an Independent Consultant for Resonance Network and Leadership Learning Community (LLC’s) WEB network. Based in Maryland, Denisha  supports networks organizing around similar causes move through key processes to achieve their goals. Her work includes weaving together individuals, strategic planning, facilitation design, with high levels of interaction and participation, network thinking, and leadership skills.

Denisha has a healthy goal to use hashtag activism (ex. #metoo #blacklivesmatter) to normalize the discussion around preventing child sex abuse in every home. As founder of Paranoia to Prevention (#paranoiatoprevention) Denisha raises awareness on adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s).

Purvi Shah

Purvi Shah inspires changes as a consultant on gender, racial, and economic equity. As an anti-violence advocate, trainer, grassroots researcher, and facilitator committed to opening space for transformation, she delights in movement-making, strategic action for change, and furthering equity in community.

While serving as Executive Director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti-violence agency, she witnessed the profound impact of systems on immigrant survivors of violence. The disparity in access to justice for survivors led her to spearhead coalition-building towards local and national systems change on language access in the courts. This effort led to a new court rule on access to interpreters and a State workplan for language access. In 2008, she won the inaugural SONY South Asian Excellence Award for Social Service for her leadership fighting gender violence.

Deborah Elizabeth Finn

Deborah Elizabeth Finn works with mission-based organizations as a network weaver, capacity builder,  technical assistance provider, and nonprofit technology strategist. She holds degrees from Bennington College and Harvard University.

Deborah is a dedicated student of best practices in equity, inclusion, and positive social change, as well as a passionate proponent of collaboration, peer learning, communities of practice, knowledge sharing, leadership development, and mentoring. She founded the Mission-Based Massachusetts community in 2005, and the TNB Roundtable in 2013.

Deborah Fishman

Deborah Fishman is an entrepreneur, network-weaver, and founder of FED (www.fedsocial.co), an inclusive Jewish community and platform for ideas and art. Deborah works at the intersection of people, food and ideas, weaving together relationships that spark unexpected dialogue, synergy, and connection. Deborah views her mission in life as making sure everyone is fed — physically, intellectually, spiritually and on a basic human level. FED has hosted over 150 creative gatherings, in NYC, Paris, Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Mallorca, Budapest, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and Boston. FED belongs to Hakhel: The Jewish Intentional Communities Incubator, for which Deborah serves as Advisor and Network Manager, and leads Hakhel’s Arts & Culture Subnetwork. Deborah has 15 years’ experience working in the Jewish community, including at The AVI CHAI Foundation and PresenTense, where she was the Editor & Publisher of PresenTense Magazine.

Karen Tronsgard-Scott

My life practice is supporting aspirations and dream-making.    I believe together, we can build a world where all thrive over generations.  I am seeking ways to integrate spirit, community, physical presence and this thing we call work.  Love is my gift and knowing is my core strength.  I will always be learning and experimenting.  I am invested in knowing the ancestors and hearing their wisdom in service of the descendants.  I am a story-teller and a listener.  My personal challenge that gets in my way is doubt.  Still, I love without reservation.

Saida Agostini

Saida Agostini is a movement builder, activist and poet. The Chief Operating Officer for FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, she supports FORCE in sustaining and expanding its organizational capacity to foster survivor led organizing.

In her work, Saida has organized statewide advocacy initiatives promoting the rights of LGBTQ youth in foster care, education and juvenile justice, and directed art actions uplifting the visibility of Black girls, women and queer folks.

A skilled facilitator, Saida has guided capacity building and needs assessment processes for local and state initiatives to address the needs of LGBTQ populations, people of color and youth.

Danielle M. Varda, PhD

Danielle M. Varda, PhD is the CEO of Visible Network Labs and an Associate Professor at the University of CO Denver in the School of Public Affairs. Dr. Varda directs VNL’s data science company that hosts the Aspen platform, including apps and web based tools to track the progress of network interventions and the largest database of cross-sector inter-organizational networks.

These include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded PARTNER tool, a social network analysis survey and analysis tool and the Person-Centered Network (PCN App), a tool to assess the strengths and gaps in a person’s personal support networks. She is also the director of theNetwork Leadership Training Academy, a three day workshop for network leaders to increase skills to build, manage, and evaluate effective networks. She has consulted with over 100 organizations on network leadership, and has evaluated dozens of cross-sector community networks.

Lisa Watson

Lisa Watson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Openly, an impact strategy and research company committed to social good. Lisa is a social impact strategist with 20 years of experience designing, weaving and evaluating networks in the nonprofit, philanthropic and government sectors. For 15 years, she held senior positions in the Ontario provincial government and United Way Toronto & York Region.

As a consultant and coach, her core areas of contribution include strategy, learning, leadership and organizational development. Lisa shares her passion for the power of networks as a faculty member with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and through her work with organizations and networks across the country.

Sarah Ann Shanahan

Bruce Hoppe

Bruce Hoppe, PhD, founder and president of Connective Associates, is an experienced consultant with a passion for customer service and translating data into bottom line impact. A creative problem solver for 20+ years, he has focused on helping organizations to optimize insight and impact in networks of leaders, customers, and stakeholders.

Dr. Hoppe’s consulting and coaching services include network mapping and analysis, network development, network evaluation, and network and communication ecosystems. Many of Dr. Hoppe’s most notable projects involve catalyzing collective awareness and action.

Ari Sahagún

I grew up in the tallgrass prairies of Illinois, USA, where the lanky sandhill cranes pause on their way to and from Mexico.  Retracing one of my family’s roots, I’ve recently moved south to Mexico City to do what I do as a mixed heritage person: build bridges.  

One facet of my work as building bridges between extractive capitalism/colonialism and a society that repairs and regenerates from these traumas.  The other part of my work is building bridges that support movement networks on the path toward a more just society.

Right now, this looks like facilitating peer learning among climate justice organizations in the United States, mapping interconnections between citizen-generated data initiatives around the world, and developing behaviors for large-scale network health to end violence against women.  My specialties are at the intersections of network strategy, social network analysis, technology, and communication cultures.

Yasmin Yonis

Yasmin Yonis is an organizational consultant and coach, a facilitator, and a movement chaplain providing care to organizers and community members.

Yonis supports groups in the creative re-imagining of how to do justice work in more just ways. She serves as a consultant to organizations and foundations shifting toward more liberatory and collaborative work cultures and organizational strategies. She provides Network Training for groups interested in becoming system-shifting networks and facilitates communities of practice. In addition, Yonis mobilizes donor funds to the frontlines of social movements as a member of the Emergent Fund’s Advisory Council and serves on the Board of Directors of Alight (formerly American Refugee Committee). She also supported the building of a $20 million California donor fund addressing the infrastructure and care needs of migrants in the US-Mexico border crisis.

Pedro Portela

Pedro Portela was born and raised in Porto, Portugal where he studied mechanical engineering. After almost a decade in the aerospace sector working as COO and systems engineer, he quit his job and started a journey of personal transformation that initiated with a permaculture design course. He spent 4 years self-educating himself in complex systems science and network science. He’s an alumni of the Schumacher College (UK) Leadership and Facilitation Course (class of 2016)

He’s the Founder of the Hivemind Institute, a think tank and action research organization in Portugal dedicated exclusively to prototype new models of local organization, advocating for more systems literacy and proposing networked approaches to complex social problems.

He’s been involved as a consultant in Peace building and Conflict Transformation initiatives in Africa where he organizes workshops on Network leadership and is deploying innovative technology to promote network thinking among youth civil society leaders.   

Carole Martin

Network Education, Development and Evaluation Services

• Is network leadership a skill set that you and your community hope to cultivate?
• Are you interested in better understanding or evaluating the connections between leaders or community members to leverage existing social capital?
• Would you like to identify practical ways for network participants to establish or improve relationships, share resources and communicate effectively to address an issue, act on an idea, or accelerate a change initiative?
• Are you considering utilizing a network strategy in your community building or grant making and evaluation process?

Whether you seek to develop new approaches to connecting people for a specific purpose or evaluate and enhance the effectiveness of an existing network, I can help you deepen knowledge and awareness and devise achievable strategies and action plans.

Joni Bryan

Social Impact Storyteller – Alchemist | Salesforce MVP | Believer in Love, Justice, and Equality

I am a social impact storyteller helping nonprofits use data to tell their stories of empowerment, compassion, inspiration, and change! An advocate committed to building the capacity of social impact organizations through strategic alignment, technology, and community engagement, I bring a diverse range of approaches to the work of organizations, helping to align mission and vision with resources and technology.

I have spent the past 20 years heavily involved in social activism and community building, including co-founding two nonprofit organizations.

Sara Shapiro-Plevan

Sara Shapiro-Plevan is all about relationships. Her essential focus: understanding the way relationships influence our ability to improve our practice, understand our work, and engage effectively with others as we build sustainable networks, communities and workplaces.

Sara consults primarily with Jewish educational organizations, schools, congregations, and foundations to develop a networked, collaborative culture and approach to their practice in a variety of domains, supporting their alignment with vision.  

Kiara Nagel

Kiara Nagel is a creative strategist based in Los Angeles with 20 years of experience building creative and collaborative initiatives and supporting social groups, leaders, and organizations to become more engaged and effective.  

At the core of her diverse body of work is a dedication to ensuring those most affected are directly engaged in decision-making about how their places can be shaped, understood and represented and connect and collaborate with others to bring about change.  

Bill Richmond

My work with networks comes out of my experiences as a classroom teacher and working inside large educational bureaucracies. I believe that the power of networks comes from the idea that we are all leaders and everyone is a peer.   

With this in mind, I enjoy working collaboratively to find simple and meaningful solutions to complex problems.  Most of work has been centered on network mapping and network training.

My network mapping experience includes developing surveys, using network mapping software, map generation and analysis, coordinating mapping projects, giving presentations on maps and metrics, and training others to do network mapping and analysis. 

Tracy Kunkler

Tracy Kunkler, MSW, is a Principal and co-founder of Circle Forward, a system of collaborative governance, providing frameworks and decision-making tools to leverage change in large-scale systems. It has been particularly effective in cross-sector networks, where the complexity of institutional partners makes decision-making more difficult.  It is being used by networks at many different levels, from neighborhoods and municipalities, to food policy and large landscape conservation networks, to other community development and cross sector networks around the country.

Circle Forward Partners, our team, brings the latest research and our own hard-won experience into your space to support you in designing your own collaborative governance system. 

Deitre Epps

Deitre Epps is the CEO and Founder of RACE for Equity, LLC.

Deitre has worked for over twenty years to address the ill effects of poverty on low income communities. She provided direct services to Baltimore City’s children and their families for over a decade as an educator and program director for infants to 8th grade students and as a professor at Baltimore City Community College. She also taught early childhood education courses at Towson State University. She was previously the founding director of the Baltimore School Readiness Initiative, a city-wide effort which contributed to an increase in kindergarten readiness from 27% to 58% over four years using the Results-Based Accountability (RBA) framework.

Christine Capra

I’ve played many roles in change efforts over the decades, and have discovered that I’m happiest when acting as a Network Guardian, supporting others with the skills & tools they need to be as effective as possible.

To that end, I’ve applied my background in data-gathering/ evaluation/visualization, combined with my Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership, to my ongoing drive to discover and develop tools that can help others turn their social change visions into realities.

With my partner, Tim Hanson, I developed the network-data-gathering-tool sumApp (www.greaterthanthesum.com/sumapp) which anyone can subscribe to, to learn about the connections in their network. sumApp gathers that data in a social-network/survey-like platform and outputs the data in the format needed for network visualization tools such as Gephi and Kumu.io.

Curtis Ogden

Curtis Ogden is a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC). Much of his work entails consulting with multi-stakeholder networks to strengthen and transform food, education, public health, and economic systems at local, state, regional, and national levels. He has worked with networks to launch and evolve through various stages of development.

Some of his current and past clients include: Food Solutions New England, Vermont Farm to Plate Network, InFACT at Ohio State, Partnership for the Future of Learning, New Technology Network, Next Generation Learning Challenges, Cancer Free Economy Network, Collaborative Action Newark, Community Practitioners Network (New Hampshire), and CareerSTAT/National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

William P. Moore, Ph. D.

Bill has spent his entire career working in our most challenged communities – both urban and rural – and with vulnerable populations to find solutions to our most pressing social, education, and health concerns. Bill is a Senior Fellow at the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership and Principal at The Strategy Group.

The Group provides advisory and consultation services to foundations, nonprofits, schools and communities in areas of organizational learning, network development and community engagement, community capacity building, rural health and social justice issues. Bill recently retired from the REACH Healthcare Foundation after serving as the Vice President of Program and Evaluation where he guided the overall design, implementation and evaluation of the Foundation’s grant- and change-making strategies.

Beth Tener

Beth Tener is a leadership trainer and coach who helps social change leaders live their values as they address complex challenges, such as transitioning to a clean energy economy, disrupting racism, and revitalizing communities. She is passionate about bringing people together in ways that unlock and ignite personal, group, and community potential. She is the founder of New Directions Collaborative, based in Portsmouth, NH, and has worked with over 200 organizations and collaborative networks. Her current focus in an initiative based in New Hampshire called Kinship: a hub to amplify the power of community. Here, experienced community builders and social change leaders can connect and get peer support, coaching, and training. She also offers participatory meeting design services. Beth writes a blog on topics of collaborative leadership, systems change, and networked ways of working. She has also curated great lists of resources for network weavers here and here.

Abby Yanow

Abby Yanow is a Facilitator and Leadership coach.  She has created and facilitated many peer learning networks for the purpose of knowledge-sharing, problem solving and collaboration.   Her colleagues consider her the go-to person for creating communities of practice. Abby also coaches facilitators on network and meeting design.

Since 2001, Abby has served as President of the Boston Facilitators Roundtable.  In the BFR she has developed a thriving community of facilitators and consultants who generously share their knowledge and expertise. Under her leadership, the BFR was awarded the 2015 Outstanding Regional Organizational Development Network award.

Debbie Gowensmith

Debbie Gowensmith, M.S., is vice-president of Groundswell Services, Inc., dedicated to strengthening equity-building movements. She provides consultation in evaluation and community-based research, specializing in network facilitation and evaluation.

Debbie has found networking to be a key component in developing innovative, powerful ideas that catalyze social change. Her experience includes six years directing an organization that empowered Hawaiian communities to reclaim stewardship of the places where they live, work and play. Through networking, dozens of isolated Hawaiian communities more quickly and effectively created dynamic community-driven resource management projects that are changing conservation in Hawai‘i.

Derrick Rhayn

Derrick Rhayn is the Chief Catalyst at Networks for Change, a Seattle consulting firm specializing in building the capacity of social change networks and nonprofit organizations through consulting, training, and coaching. As a ‘network weaver,’ Derrick focuses on facilitating increased connectivity within networks and nonprofits as a way of unleashing their potential, mobilizing their hidden assets, and generating innovative solutions with an orientation towards systems change.

Derrick has spent his entire career in the nonprofit sector, and has a passion for fund development, emerging economic models, and food systems. He is currently working with groups focused on circular economy, regional food systems, cooperative economics, impact investing, and community development finance.

Janne K. Flisrand

My own work makes cities great places for the people who live there. I work so everyone has a secure home, for streets that put people first, and to stop climate change. I’m trained as an applied urban anthropologist, a field focused on understanding and amplifying other people’s voices. Since 2004, I’ve designed and led networks that lift up member’s power.

I mix and match resources to make positive change. With Minnesota Green Communities, a state-wide green affordable housing initiative, I plotted our path towards a green rehab standard. My task force process addressed the concerns of funders, engineers, and energy professionals. Together, they crafted an affordable, healthy, buildable set of expectations. We’ll scale up your network’s impact, whether you need big-picture thinking to get a jumpstart, or small design details to make the most of every interaction.

Kristin Johnstad

My consulting practice focuses on strengthening the capacity of individuals, networks and communities to address such complex challenges as access to healthy food, equitable youth and family outcomes, health and economic disparities and the fragmentation of out of school time enrichment opportunities for students. I have ongoing relationships with an exceptional cadre of consultants and assemble teams to get the best results for my clients.

My areas of network expertise include: coaching, training, facilitating peer-learning models, designing effective and fun engagement strategies, and helping others get excited about using data to mobilize, plan and take collective action.

June Holley

June has been weaving networks, helping others weave networks and writing about networks for over 40 years. She is currently increasing her capacity to capture learning and innovations from the field and sharing what she discovers through blog posts, occasional virtual sessions and a forthcoming book.  Topics she will be focusing on in the coming year include:

• a communications system where weavers can support each other and share information
• a place to share what people are learning from their practice,
• a set of resources drawn from emergent practice,
• a set of practices to address inequities and
• a social media strategy to draw more people around the globe into the network weaving network.

Her Practice

In 1981 June discovered complexity science and became intrigued with the process of transformation. How could communities change in ways that would make them good places for everyone? 

For the next two decades, she worked with others in Appalachian Ohio to catalyze cascades of network experimentation, observing and documenting the dynamics that enabled many hundreds of people to start and then expand businesses in rural Appalachia. With these newly minted entrepreneurs, she mobilized dozens of area organizations to collaborate, self-organize and create an environment that would help these businesses innovate, expand and work together to create an effective support system for networked entrepreneurs.

After twenty years as executive director of the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet), she stepped down to devote her energies to helping communities around the globe form system shifting, self-organizing networks by training and supporting network weavers and helping new networks form.

The hundred or so network projects she has advised range from local networks to international ones; included networks focused on a specific sector such as food access or health access as well as cross sector initiatives such network leadership networks; reached from small rural networks with a few dozen participants to massive networks with thousands of international participants including the networkweavers network. All recent projects have had a strong equity focus and a commitment to dismantling racism and hierarchy.  June has led hundreds of interactive workshops – many of them virtual – on applying a network approach and authored the Network Weaver Handbook and over 20 blog posts.

Network Support Systems

In the last few years,  June has shifted her energies to co-creating the support ecosystem needed so that millions of people around the world have access to network and self-organizing strategies and can use them to rapidly transform systems. This support ecosystem includes: 

• a communications system where weavers can support each other and share information
• a place to share what people are learning from their practice,
• a set of resources drawn from emergent practice,
• a set of practices to address inequities and
• a social media strategy to draw more people around the globe into the network weaving network.

The site www.networkweaver.com and a set of related activities became the focus for these efforts.  The site includes a space for 51 network weaving consultants to present their skills and offerings to the world; this group is also supported through a monthly community of practice. Since dismantling racism is a key tenet of network weaving, proactive outreach to consultants of color was undertaken and an equity fund set up to compensate BIPOC authors for blog posts and resource development.

The networkweaver blog is now a place for the latest network thinking and practice to be shared. Over 78 contributors have written pieces for the blog. 

The final section of the site is the resources section where 49 handouts, worksheets, powerpoints, modules and books are offered, most free of charge, on every aspect of network formation and practice. Although many of these resources are derived from June’s many years of practice, they are increasingly coming from practitioners in the field.

The Network Weaving Facebook group of 2400 people is a place for weavers to share information and get support for challenges. 

Blog posts, consultant offerings, events  and resources are shared through an enewsletter and a social media system reaching a over 18,000 people (and expanding by about 300 people each month) through Twitter, LinkedIn, scoop.it, Facebook and medium.  

Current and Future Directions: Network Weaving Institute

In the four decades that June has been supporting networks, they have shifted from being a fringe phenomenon to being the favored way of responding to our complex world. But networks come in all shapes and sizes and we still have only rough guidance in knowing which kinds of networks are best for different situations and how they can be most effectively structured.

During the coming decade, June is stepping back from major consulting projects to focus on taking all that she and others have learned about networks with transformative capacity and writing a series of articles (which may well morph into a book or set of videos). This will be done collaboratively as much as possible – sharing her writings in google docs open to commenting and/or joint editing. 

June will also continue to develop materials and modules that can be used by individuals or networks to deepen their understanding of networks.

In addition to writing June will identify a few high leverage cross network efforts (connecting more environmental networks to networks promoting equity and the need to dismantle racism and hierarchy, for example, or helping national networks provide more support to local self-organizing efforts) and will provide opportunities to explore network potentials at no cost. If you know of two or more networks that could benefit by being connected, please let June know!

Finally, June will occasionally offer 60 minute one time advice and exploration sessions to networks who have a specific challenge they would like to discuss. Visit the Consultation page to set up an appointment

Click here to down load a copy of June’s resume. 

For more information, contact June Holley at juneholley@nwinstitute.org .