I work in the Futures team, helping organisations think about how the future could be different from today and plan for different possible futures. Most of my work falls within the energy system, but I have a keen interest in sustainable fashion, B2B businesses, and value chains. My ideal project is multifaceted. A particular interest of mine is working with organisations to create robust strategies that look twenty to thirty years into the future, but allow them to implement change strategies today to prepare the business for possible eventualities. Along with working with individual businesses, I’m passionate about facilitating cooperation between leading organisations to create environmentally and socially sustainable business practices. I’m also interested in how change takes shape within business and through consumers. Like many of my colleagues, my path to Forum wasn’t straightforward. I’d originally been interested in marketing and earned my M.Sc. at the University of St Andrews. Following my course I was offered a position working on three public sector futures projects in Scotland. One of these, which examined the future of sustainable communities in Scotland commissioned for the Scottish Parliament, got me particularly interested in sustainability. Since then I have worked on several other independent consulting futures projects with the Scottish Parliament, SEPA and EURAM. Although I love London’s unique neighbourhoods, live music and museums, I miss the fresh air of the Scottish coast and the Michigan wilderness. Away from work, I spend a great deal of time on my photography, and travel regularly.

I am a Senior Strategist in Forum’s New York office. I am fascinated by complex systems and have devoted my career to learning how systems work, assessing problems, and making them manageable. I see Forum’s Future’s practice as critical to systems change. I help people and organizations think strategically and long term so that they can anticipate change as well as create the future they want. I use tools such as visioning, three horizons, scenario planning, and trends decks, among others, to help structure thinking about the future. Depending on the project, I design games, create immersive experiences, and try to bring the future to life. At Forum I work on a large range of projects with a focus on food, retail, and consumer packaged goods. Some of the more recent projects have been Tea 2030, Retail Horizons, and Protein 2040. In my career I’ve done futures workshops with monks in Burma, the US government, students at places like the University of Hawaii and the New School, foundations, and businesses. I have a background in international development and am particularly interested in using futures as a means of community building and social change. My undergraduate studies were in anthropology and engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and I went on to become a Fulbright scholar in India. I hold a M.S. degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, with a focus in international development.

I joined Forum in January 2019 as Head of Marketing and Communications. Prior to Forum, I held a range of marketing roles across the private, public and charity sectors, working in-house for Tesco plc, Sport England, WWF-UK and Save the Children as well as in partnership with brands such as M&S, HSBC, GSK and many more. I’m extremely passionate about through-the-line marketing and at Forum, oversee our communications across paid, owned and earned media with a particular focus on building brand profile and credibility not just in the UK but in support of our growing ambitions across Asia, India and the US.

My passion lies in helping ideas to bubble to the surface and then making them actually happen. I get fidgety if I think something might just sit on a piece of paper on a shelf. So it fits that the work on innovation within pioneering businesses is what really excites me. A great deal of my work centres on understanding the future opportunities for business in creating a sustainable world, trying out these solutions on a small scale and then working out what that means for taking the idea mainstream - shaping the system as we go. I’m currently running the Forum office in Mumbai, a city alive with innovation and entrepreneurship. I joined Forum in 2007, following a hectic few months getting reforestation into the North Argentine psyche. I’d come across Forum as part of my Sustainable Business Masters at Leeds University and fell in love with the idea of working at the cutting edge of this field.

I’m motivated by the ability of designers and entrepreneurs to innovate new products and services based not just on past successes, but on future possibilities and preferred future outcomes. My foray into the overlap of design, business and sustainability began formally at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, a pioneering MBA program that integrates sustainability into every course. Since then, I’ve worked at Saatchi and Saatchi to design and deliver sustainability programs with companies such as WalMart, NBC Universal, Duke Energy and Procter and Gamble and at the collaborative strategy and design firm, Helsinki Group. When I in New York I was adjunct faculty at Parson’s New School in a program that integrated design thinking, systems thinking, urban policy and environmental science. There have been several times over the past few years I’ve wished there was a platform where competitors could collaborate so that we could move faster to address our systemic challenges. In my imagination passionate people with tested processes and a bold vision for change would manage the platform. Eh voila, Forum! I’m very excited to be working with the brilliant folks at Forum and our pioneering partners to tackle problems at a systemic level.

I am responsible for supporting Jonathon Porritt in all his work – with Forum for the Future, and with his various other campaigning initiatives and roles. I completed a BSc in Environmental Science at Plymouth, and subsequently have worked in the NGO sector, covering a spectrum of campaigning activities including the introduction of lead-free petrol and the Campaign for Freedom of Information. I moved from London to Cheltenham in 1992 to manage Jonathon Porritt’s Office, prior to the establishment of Forum for the Future.

I lead and manage futures projects, helping Forum to develop its futures practice at the leading edge of sustainability and systemic thinking. I support Forum’s partners and network in thinking about potential futures to inform the choices and the strategies they are making now. I've been a consultant and facilitator in futures and organisational change for over 15 years. I’ve helped international corporations, UK government department teams and NGOs to extend their thinking about the future, preparing for it, and creating change in entrenched systemic issues. Projects and clients have included the UK Government Office for Science’s Horizon Scanning Centre; a joint project with the MOD, DFID and FCO; the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and Nestle, among others. I've also specialised in leading story-based processes to innovate, share knowledge, develop visions, and co-create stories for change with companies from IKEA to The Body Shop to Hewlett Packard. For seven years I worked in futurefocus, a creative futures and innovation facility in BIS, facilitating teams from across government and other stakeholders to imagine and plan for the future. Working with future-shaping trends across multiple sectors made me aware that so many systems are heading towards crisis. I continuously ran up against the evidence of humanity’s living beyond our ecological means. Yet in the face of urgent need for widespread, significant change, neither government, business nor civil society seemed to be connecting the dots. Searching for more joined-up thinking led me to the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility, where I focused my action research on pathways to creating systemic change. Eventually my search for a systemic and collaborative approach, led me to Forum. As well as an MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility (Distinction 2013), I have a BA in International Relations and a Diploma in Organisational Change and Development.

I build partnerships with a growing network of philanthropic organisations and individuals who share Forum’s goal of creating a more sustainable world. These generous supporters help ensure Forum has the finance, expertise and influence to have a global, long-term impact. For over a decade I’ve helped business leaders, families and strategic foundations to achieve their philanthropic goals through building meaningful relationships with UK and global non-profits. I also help charities realise the full value within these partnerships through organisational development and creating a culture of philanthropy. I believe development staff have a key role to play in growing philanthropy in the UK and globally. I have supported fundraisers’ learning and growth as a mentor, speaker and committee member at the Institute of Fundraising. I want to create a more sustainable world. If, like me, you spend a lot of time in nature, the environmental impact of how we do things is impossible to ignore. Plastic everywhere, lack of birdsong in our farmlands, bare rock where glaciers once flowed, and more extreme weather. Changing how the world works is not easy. The challenges are big, tricky and complex. Forum has the expertise, networks and resources to have a global impact, and I’m proud to be part of the team.

I’m a design practitioner with a longstanding curiosity towards systemic change and the ways in which it can be fostered. Trained as an architect, I am used to shifting between different scales and topics, and I am committed to both social and environmental sustainability. I believe in research-based design that is both deeply rooted in specific conditions and developed through 1:1 prototyping. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art, my professional experience encompasses architectural practice, academic research, as well as the non-profit sector. In 2013, I founded the Bucharest-based NGO, Poiana lui Iocan, as an umbrella platform for a series of live projects exploring collaborative city-making. Through engaging with a variety of academic and professional environments I have come to understand the possibilities and limitations of each field of work and I realised that I’m most excited when blurring boundaries and finding the interrelations between them – which paved the way to me arriving at Forum!

My passion lies in empowering communities and driving transformative change. My role at Forum – which is to guide 5 major palm oil companies through a pre-competitive collaboration to address systemic labour rights challenges – is a unique and exciting opportunity to do just that! My additional role in helping develop Forum’s Protein Challenge in the Asia Pacific region is a further opportunity to break new ground. This pivot to sustainability follows my prior incarnation as a human rights lawyer, where I spearheaded a landmark case on indigenous land rights before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, successfully challenged discriminatory provisions of the Dayton Peace Agreement before the European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber), and defended stateless communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to continue engaging on meaningful and impactful work through Forum!

Someone recently said to me that the evidence for the future is our commitment to it in the present. I’m motivated by helping people explore the futures they want to commit to today, and find a sense of agency in creating the wider change that needs to happen to get there. I work on a mixture of strategy projects and system change experiments with partners such as Pukka Herbs, KP Group and the KR Foundation. My journey in sustainability started on Forum’s MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development, exploring systems change for sustainability in different contexts, from the public procurement of food with Defra, to decentralised energy networks with the TCPA, to exploring how banks can contribute to creating shared value with Barclays. I then spent a bit of time at Unilever, looking at strategies to mainstream sustainability into the business models of large corporates and developing a communications toolkit for Unilever’s leaders to communicate their connection to the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. I found my way back to Forum after spending time working in trend analysis at an independent futures consultancy, and a fun-but-failed attempt at entrepreneurship through selling insects as a sustainable protein alternative.

I am passionate about designing and facilitating programmes for individuals, organizations and systems to learn and find innovative approaches to change. This requires an experimental approach which drives cutting edge system change practice. I am currently driving the School of System Change which is curating and offer access to the best learning experiences, tools and case studies so as to build a global learning community, for accomplished and aspiring change agents. Continuing the work of the System Innovation Lab exploring the edges of system change practice - looking at how we might accelerate the next wave or the fundamental paradigm system change required. My own journey has meant I have worked on a wider range of system change strategies and projects. I started facilitating multi stakeholder processes around the WSSD in 2002. At WWF-UK I ran a six year system change education programme, including a project with the NCSL to set up 56 communities of practice to knit innovative practices together. This experience supported me in developing practical strategic system change frameworks for WWF-UK and Forum but also for organisations such as Unilever, Nike, Shell Foundation, Caluste Gulbenkian Foundation, Innovate UK and the NHS; whilst coaching on a wide number of projects and initiatives across sectors and systems. I have a postgraduate diploma at Bath University in action research and a PhD at Lancaster on ‘How might people and organisations, who seek a sustainable future, cultivate systemic change?’.