Mansi Jasuja | India / The Netherlands
Mansi feels fortunate to have lived an unconventional story that brought her from practicing architecture in Delhi, India to being a practitioner designing & hosting meaningful conversations and processes in Europe, based in The Hague. She offers a deep connection to life with her art, humour, stories, yoga, creative inspirations & a lot of colourful energy. As an environmentalist since the age of 4, Mansi followed that thread and worked across several urban environmental disciplines in various international organisations & NGOs including United Nations, European Union, CARE-India. In 2008, a visceral sense of climate urgency led her to re-orient and began on a new path of unlearning and relearning. In the last 15 years, she has been strongly purpose driven and focuses on facilitating participatory leadership, systems change, DEI & empowerment through building capacities & skills. She's an international speaker/host, an artist-sense maker as well as a process design geek around creating participatory processes. Mansi is co-stewarding the Dutch field of Art of Participatory Leadership. She is also currently writing a book on the true cost of holding non-participatory gatherings.
Narayan Silva | Brazil / China
Narayan grew up in Brazil but fell in love with India when he lived there for the first time in 2007, and has returned numerous times ever since. He holds a MSc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability, and is guided by his passion to support people and organisations who want to realise their potential for creating positive impact. He experienced his first Art of Hosting training in 2013 in Sweden, which had a great impact in his life. Since then he has dedicated his work to this field of practice, which has allowed him to host collaborative processes for numerous organisations around the world from all sectors. He is based in Shanghai since 2018, working for the sustainability consulting agency CONSTELLATIONS International, supporting the collaborative efforts of European multinationals with ambitious sustainability goals, Sino-European governmental partnerships and public institutions.
Melinda Varfi | Hungary / Austria
Melinda believes in the power of communities and is passionate about helping them grow to contribute towards a sustainable society. Having worked in different fields of work, she has found that the closest topic to her heart is sustainability – both on a personal, collective and cosmological level. She has co-founded Impact Hub Budapest, a global community based coworking office. She enjoys engaging with people in meaningful conversations about their environment and enabling them to recognize their own true power to make steps towards a more regenerative world. In the last 13 years she has been facilitating and designing such dialogues and processes with participatory methods such as Art of Hosting and Theory U for organisations such as Greenpeace, WHO, the European Union and many municipalities who have stepped into the participatory democracy path. She used to live in Chennai, Tamil Nadu and feels like India is her second homeland.
Maria Scordialos | Greece
Maria is a process artist, host and social entrepreneur, creating the conditions for individuals, teams and leaders to live their fullest potential. She offers her natural ability to see patterns, create structure and design processes so that new solutions and forms can be co-created. Maria is a co-initiator of the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Meaningful Conversations (also known as Participatory Leadership), and also a co-founder of Living Wholeness Institute, a consultancy and place of learning with nature in Greece. Maria has applied her practice of participatory leadership through being a consultant for over 20 years working in a wide range of contexts from the European Union Institutions, Agencies and bodies to foundations and non-profit organisations as well as through working with multi-disciplinary networks, social movements and activists.
Joanna Pyres | India / UK
Joanna, an Anglo Goan, has worked in sustainable development collaboration for the last 22 years, through international bodies including Business in the Community, The Partnership Brokers Association and The Partnering Initiative. Her global work with governments, EU, INGOs and business ignited a passionate quest for practices that support communities to participate in sustainable development partnerships so they can shape their own destinies. This led her to discover the Art of Hosting practice which she feels is critical for cutting through the power dynamics that get in the way of constructive dialogue and creating spaces where everyone has a say in co creating programmes and projects. Joanna has been applying the Art of Hosting approach in communities and colleges in Goa and businesses in Mumbai and Bangalore with spectacular results. Joanna is committed to supporting community driven green pathways and helping Goans find a way to protect Goa’s magical quality of life in the face of rampant destructive urbanisation.
Archana Lemanja Tomar | India
Archana has as vast a tapestry of experience as the places she has lived in, with her current home in Eastern Himalayas in the state of Meghalaya. She is her brother’s sister, a mountain wanderer, a voracious reader, fascinated by nature and is most at home in a forest, by a water body or on top of a mountain. Early in her career, she co-founded a Brand and Reputation Consultancy, then moved to answer a higher purpose and called to work with communities in the Himalayas after a decade. Meeting Kaka Wera, an Indigenous Elder from Brazil during a Social Entrepreneur Leadership Program deeply motivated her to explore the rapidly vanishing Ancestral Wisdom and the urgent need to protect it. Ever since, she has been working with Indigenous Knowledge Ecosystem at the Intersection of Asia, Africa & Latin America, with the intention to reintegrate it to the heart of our existence and practice. She is co-creating and designing Intergenerational Indigenous Learning Spaces, bridging the gap between Ancestral Wisdom and New Age Knowledge. She believes Art of Hosting is a very essential practice to engage in meaningful conversation across not just diverse age groups but also different actors in the system.
Senthil Kumar G | India
Senthil is a Research Scientist turned Serious Game Designer and a game-powered Learning Facilitator. He is the Founder of MADIEE Games and is passionate about creating meaningful games and game-powered learning experiences that help people unleash their true potential. As a Leadership & Organisational Development consultant, he has built a global clientele that includes Fortune 500 companies, Social Impact and Not-for-profit organisations and Emerging Startups, and is widely admired for his creative and impactful facilitation. Senthil is a global digital citizen and presently lives with his family in his native town, Komarapalayam in Tamil Nadu. Together with his family, he is exploring unschooling as a way of Learning.
Karthikeyan Gopinathan | India
Karthikeyan Gopinathan is a design thinking facilitator with over 9 years of experience, Founder of Xensible Innovation Lab and currently leading the Human Centered Design Initiatives at IHCRF(India Health and Climate Resilience Fellowship).
Trained as a product designer at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, He delivers solutions across agriculture, healthcare, ageing and social development sectors. Previously a Schmidt-MacArthur Fellow for Circular Economy and a BIRAC SIIP fellow in Geriatrics. He works primarily with early-stage healthcare startups to help in conceptualisation and physical and digital product development and currently co-creating solutions with physiotherapists.