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Futurists
Society

Aditee Prabhakar

Sustainable Architect and Urban Planner

Aditee Prabhakar, is a scholar of future studies, architect and urban planner. She is a Research Fellow conducting studies on the exchange between the culture and city planning in Ancient Silk Road Cities at Qazaq Research Institute for Future Studies (QRIFS) at Narxoz University, and a Ph.D. Scholar in the Department of Architecture, Town and Regional Planning, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, India. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. at IIEST in "Systems Approach for Special Planning of Human Settlements", utilizing deep experience in sustainable architecture and planning with a focus on ecologically fragile areas.

Alexandra Whittington

Futurist, Tata Consultancy Services

Alexandra Whittington is a Global Futurist, Keynote Speaker, Writer, and Foresight Director at Fast Future who has been recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists. She has taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Houston since 2009, where her courses explore the impact of technology on society and the future of human ecosystems. Coauthor of numerous books, studies, and articles, Alex has been involved in a number of research and consulting projects. She is on the Futurist Board at the Lifeboat Foundation and contributor to the Lifeboat blog. Alex has a B.A. in Anthropology and an M.S. in Studies of the Future and is a volunteer reviewer for the Foresight journal and an XPRIZE Community Member.

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Amber Allen

Founder + CEO, Double A Labs

Amber Allen founded Double A Labs in 2013 to reinvent experiential marketing for brands to reach communities of fans that are often elusive, skeptical yet high-value audiences - over 4.6 million attendees and counting. In 6 years, the company has generated 2.7 billion impressions, growing to 50 people who embody and influence these communities. Pioneers of experiential technologies, from everything AR, VR and mixed reality, to Spatial Computing, Tobii Eye Tracking, Holograms and Projection-Mapping, they are known to deliver never-seen-before experiences for brands. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Double A Labs, proudly WBENC certified, also has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and London, with strategic alliances in Asia and Latin America.

Amy Webb

CEO of the Future Today Institute

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist and a bestselling, award-winning author. Professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. Webb is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. She was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy. Webb was named by Forbes as one of the five women changing the world, listed as the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020, and the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.

Amy Zalman

Founder, Prescient Energy

Amy Zalman is the former CEO and President of the World Future Society where she led its transformation from a publishing model to a modern membership ecosystem, positioned for renewed global impact. Founder of Oryx Communications and Chair of Information Integration at the National War College, Zalman introduced new ways of understanding “information” to future senior leaders to better inform their perspectives on the ways the world was changing — technologically, culturally and geopolitically. Currently she is Founder of foresight firm, Prescient, providing executive education, strategic retreats and other services to firms seeking to transform in the face of uncertainty and dramatic change.

Anne Boysen

Lead Quality Engineer for Qaulitest at Google

Anne Boysen is a professional futurist with an M.S. in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston and Graduate Certificate in Business Analytics, and extensive training in data mining and predictive modeling from Colorado State and Penn State universities. Anne studies social change in the context of generational shifts, particularly Generation Z. She is also a pioneer in bringing research automation and data analytics into foresight and has taught a course in these methods at the University of Houston. When Anne isn’t researching, speaking or consulting via her company After the Millennial or Futurist.com, she spends her time as an analyst at Google via Vaco.

Anne Lise Kjaer

Founder, Kjaer Global ltd.

Anne Lise’s career began in Denmark, initially in the design industries prior to establishing Kjaer Global in 1988. She lived and worked in Hamburg and Paris before choosing London as her base to evolve her passion for trends. A renowned speaker and author, she has delivered talks to over 50,000 people since 1999 and is a frequent commentator in the international press. Anne Lise is on the IPE advisory board of Singapore’s URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority) and holds the honorary title of Copenhagen Goodwill Ambassador.

April Rinne

Founder + Chief Change Navigator, April Worldwide

aprilrinne.com

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Ayelet Baron

Global Futurist + Multi-Award-Winning Author

Ayelet Baron is a visionary author, speaker, and former tech executive committed to making a transformational impact on business for the benefit of all humanity. She guides leaders of all ages to tap into their power source and intuition. Ayelet brings inspirational thinking to creating the emerging world and igniting the creator within each of us. She has worked in boardrooms across the world building billion dollar strategies as tech executive and strategist. She is the author of the award winning book, Our Journey to Corporate Sanity: Transformational Stories from the Frontiers of 21st Century Leadership. A series of three books to be published in the Fall of 2020 focused on discovering the wonder of you, trekking into the unknown and becoming health conscious. Early readers have said these books are "life changing binoculars for their souls."

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Blake Morgan

Customer Experience Futurist

Blake Morgan is a leader in customer experience. She is a keynote speaker and customer experience futurist and author of two books including the new bestselling "The Customer Of The Future: 10 Guiding Principles For Winning Tomorrow's Business". Her first book was "More is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder And Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences." Blake is a guest lecturer at Columbia University and adjunct faculty at the Rutgers executive education MBA program. She is the host of The Modern Customer Podcast and The Be Your Own Boss Podcast.

Carin Ism

Co-Founder, Future of Governance Agency

Carin Ism is co-founder of the Future of Governance Agency (FOGA). Part of the faculty of Singularity University’s Nordic Branch she teaches two subjects: Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchains) and Governance. Principal investigator of the first governance study in a Mars simulation, Ism spent time in the Himalayas, living at 14,000 feet with a crew to develop design principles for space societies. She is the chair of Effective Altruism‘s Swedish branch and Executive Director of the Global Challenges Foundation and is also the recipient of the 2019 Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Special Award in International Policy. 

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Catarina Tully

Founder, School of International Futures

Cat Tully is the founder of SOIF, the School of International Futures with extensive experience as a practitioner, helping governments, civil society and businesses to be more strategic, more effective, and better prepared for the future. Formerly,Tully was Strategy Project Director at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Senior Policy Adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She worked in strategy and international relations across the not-for-profit and business sectors, as well as the UN, the EU Commission and the World Bank. With degrees from Cambridge and Princeton Universities, she is a trustee of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development, a global board member of Academics Stand Against Poverty, a member of United Nations Learning Advisory Council for the 2030 Agenda, and a member of the Advisory Group of the British Foreign Policy Group.

Cathy Hackl

Founder + Chief Metaverse Officer, Journey

Futurist, speaker, and author Cathy Hackl is a globally recognized augmented reality, virtual reality and spatial computing thought leader. Named one of the top 10 Tech Voices on Linkedin, she was the lead futurist at You Are Here Labs, leading the application of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for marketing and training with brands like AT&T & Porsche. Hackl worked as a VR Evangelist for HTC VIVE during the launch of their enterprise VR headset and is the co-author of "Marketing New Realities", the first VR/AR marketing book ever written. She also worked as Chief Communications Officer for cinematic VR studio Future Lighthouse. Currently working on her second book "The Augmented Workforce: How AI, AR, and 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make".

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Cecily Sommers

Business Futurist, Wherefore Co.

There’s only one thing Cecily Sommers loves more than solving big, sticky innovation problems for some of the world’s great brands: getting others excited about doing it for themselves. She's had the pleasure of working with leaders at Google, American Express, General Mills, Great River Energy, JP Morgan Chase, Kraft Foods, The Mayo Clinic, helping them get to the future faster—and smarter. Recognized as one of the “Top 50 Female Futurists,” (Forbes) and a “Fast 50 Reader’s Favorite” (Fast Company), Cecily regularly shares her forecasts and insights on Public Radio’s "All Things Considered" and other media outlets, and in her book Think Like a Futurist: Know What Changes, What Doesn't, and What's Next.

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Cindy Frewen

Architect + Foresight Professor, University of Houston

Dr Cindy Frewen, FAIA, urban futurist and architect, teaches the Design Futures Workshop and Social Change at the University of Houston graduate program in Strategic Foresight. In addition, she consults, speaks, and writes on the future of cities and design futures, specializing in the intersection of people, technology, and complexity. She serves on the boards of the Kansas City Design Center and the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design. Recognized by the American Institute of Architects as a Fellow she holds an undergraduate degree in architecture and a doctorate in communications from the University of Kansas where she was recognized as a Distinguished Alumna and an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston.

Claire A. Nelson

Chief Ideation Leader, The Futures Forum

Claire Nelson is a futurist and sustainability engineer, helping organizations and people see the future more clearly and design the future they want. She pioneered development equity and strategic foresight in development assistance at the Inter-American Development Bank, and led the identification and development of technical assistance in innovation portfolio in renewable energy, stock exchange development, health care, IP and privatization across the Caribbean and Latin America. Specialties include: Strategic Foresight; International Development Project Design; Sustainability Engineering; Scenario Analysis; Stakeholder Consultation; Futures Explorations Design & Facilitation; Storytelling in business.

Crystal Washington

Futurist + Strategist, CWM Enterprises

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Cynthia Wagner

Consulting Editor, AAI Foresight

Cynthia G. Wagner began her career at the World Future Society in 1981 after receiving a master’s degree in communications/magazine journalism from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. In 1992, Cindy took the helm as THE FUTURIST’s managing editor. In January 2011, she succeeded Edward Cornish as editor. In 2010, she teamed with FUTURIST deputy editor Patrick Tucker to present the first Futurist Writers Workshop as a pre-conference Master Course at WorldFuture 2010 in Boston, which was repeated in Toronto and Orlando.

Daniele Rechard

Head of Global Trends, European Parliament

Daniele Richard has extensive insight in various policy fields, not only in the private sector but also in the European Institutions. She is currently lead of the Global Trends Unit at the European Parliament facilitating a high-level dialogue between the European Institutions to analyze and influence policy making. Other roles include: Lead of Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs reporting to the President of the EP Delegation to the Convention on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, counsellor to the former President of the EP Delegation to the Convention on the draft Constitution, and teaching as a Maître de Conférence at the Sciences-Po Paris. She holds a Master of Laws from the Sorbonne & was a Fellow at the University of Colorado.

europeanparliamentthinktank.com

Dr. Dambisa Moyo

Global Economist + Best Selling Author

Dr. Dambisa Moyo is a pre-eminent thinker, who influences key decision-makers in strategic investment and public policy. She is respected for her unique perspectives, her balance of contrarian thinking with measured judgment, and her ability to turn economic insight into investible ideas. Dambisa was named to the list of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World; has published in the Financial Times, WSJ, Barrons, Harvard Business Review and has travelled to 65 countries. In her spare time, she runs marathons, practices Pilates and is an amateur boxer.

Dr. Dana Klisanin

Founder + CEO, Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D, Inc.

Founder and CEO of Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D, Inc. Dr. Klisanin consults on a wide variety of media projects including print media, commercials, films, video games, immersive theatre, VR / AR, and the convergence of these sectors. Utilizing the transdisciplinary EGM-Integral model, Dr. Klisanin’s consulting services include psychological analysis of immersive entertainment strategies, transmedia storytelling, branching narrative design, customized psychological assessments, and priming techniques in the entertainment, retail, and nonprofit sectors.

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Dr. Guillermina Baena Paz

Professor + World Future Studies Federation Regional Vice-President

Guillermina Baena Paz is a WFSF Regional Vice-President and also the Secretary-General of the Iberam Chapter. She is a Professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico with a PhD Latin American studies, Sciences in Information Degree, Public Administration Master's Degree and PHD in Latin-American Studies at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Guillermina is a member of National System of Researchers (SNI) and of Latin-American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC). Also she is a member of World Future Society. She has been coordinating a Seminary of Prospective Studies in UNAM since January 2003. She is the editor of e-magazine Prospective Constructing Futures. Recently, she edited Working Papers Series in Political Prospective, and the Papers series of prospective thinking.

Dr. Guillermina Benavides

Futurist + Professor, Tecnológico de Monterrey

Guillermina Benavides is Professor with a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey. She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington and Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon and has participated in consultancy projects advising the Federal Government, State Governments and local Governments on public policy, economic economics and social development policies. Her research interests are future studies, strategic foresight, interinstitutional coordination of public policy and qualitative research methods. She is part of the Editorial Committee of World Futures Review and a reviewer for Technological Forecasting and Social Change Journal as well as the Journal of Social Policy and Administration.

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Dr. Leyla Acaroglu

Founder, Disrupt Design + Unschool

Sustainability provocateur and cultural protagonist Dr. Leyla Acaroglu challenges people to think differently about how the world works. As an award winning designer, UNEP Champion of the Earth, sociologist, and entrepreneur, she developed the Disruptive Design Method and designs cerebrally activating experiences, gamified toolkits, and unique educational experiences that help people make the status quo obsolete. Her mainstage TED talk on sustainability has been viewed over a million times, and she leads presentations around the world on activating positive social change through creative interventions and systems thinking. Leyla is the founder of Disrupt Design, the UnSchool and the CO Project Farm in Portugal.

Leyla Acaroglu + The Disruptive Design Method

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Dr. Lisa Galarneau

Founder + Imagineer, HireWisdom

Lisa Galarneau is a socio-cultural/applied anthropologist, futurist, and educator with a passion for understanding how modern culture and technology can positively impact our collective future. Also, UX/design researcher, writer/editor, Internet marketing mentor, artist, and social activist. Her work is focused on helping organizations discover the insights and design processes that lead to innovation and constructive disruption. In short, she is an advocate for user, customer, and citizen experience, as well as a passionate catalyst for change. Her vision? A world that works for everyone.

Lisa Galarneau

Future of Anthropology

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Elatia Abate

Entrepreneur + Futurist, Future is Now

Elatia Abate is an entrepreneur, educator and future-forward strategist that helps leaders make sense of the ever-growing disruption in our world and channel that disruption into tangible results. She is a sought-after speaker and facilitator who has led from the front of the room at Deloitte, VRBO, SHRM, Stanford and the University of Chicago, among others. In a former life she served as Global Director, Talent Acquisition with Anheuser-Busch and Vice President of Human Resources at Dow Jones & Company. She is an instructor in the Continuing Studies Departments of both Stanford University and University of Toronto. She received both her BA and MBA from the University of Chicago. Her TEDx talk is titled, “Pioneering the Future of Work”.

LinkedIn Profile

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Elina Hiltunen

CEO, What's Next Consulting

Elina Hiltunen is a Finnish futurist, keynote speaker, author of 11 books and has been listed in Forbes as one of the 50 leading female futurists in the world. Currently an entrepreneur, she has experience in working in organizations like Nokia, Finpro (Finnish trade promotion organization) and Finland Futures Research Centre. Her keynotes focus on futures thinking, megatrends, future technology, consumer trends and weak signals. Books include: "Technolife 2035- How is Technology Changing our Future” and "Foresight and Innovation - How are Companies Coping with the Future". With a D.Sc. (business) and M.Sc. (chemistry), her doctoral thesis was about Weak Signals in Organizational Futures Learning.

Erica Dhawan

Founder + CEO, Cotential

When teams want to fully harness the intelligence across their organization, break silos and get big things done, they call Erica Dhawan. Erica is one of the world’s leading authorities on 21st century collaboration and Connectional Intelligence. She challenges audiences and organizations to unlock the collective power of teams, business units, customers and other stakeholders. Her newest research – Digital Body Language — decodes the new signals and cues of effective collaboration in a digital-first human workplace.  She is the Founder & CEO of Cotential, a global organization that helps companies, leaders, and managers leverage 21st century collaboration skills and behaviors to improve game changing performance.

ericadhawan.com

Cotential

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Erica Orange

Executive Vice President + Chief Operating Officer, The Future Hunters

Erica is Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. She evaluates emerging social, technological, economic, political, demographic and environmental trends – and identifies the strategic implications (the “So what?”) of those trends for several of the most influential Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and public sector clients. Erica’s ability to connect-the-dots, spot patterns, think critically, and translate that into actionable strategies is what has made her an invaluable asset to clients. Erica frequently speaks to a wide range of global audiences about trends that are shaping and impacting today’s landscape. 

Esther Dyson

Executive Founder, Wellville + Director, BAMF Health

Esther Dyson(@edyson on twitter) is chairman of EDventure Holdings. Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing start-ups, with a recent focus on health care, human capital and aerospace. Overall, she is fascinated by new business models, new technologies and new markets (both economically and politically). From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of startups. She has a BA in economics from Harvard and was founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In addition, she wrote the best-selling, widely translated book "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age".

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment

Founding President, proGective

Dr. Fabienne Goux-Baudiment, Ph.D. is director at proGective, a tool for social watch with a focus on operational foresight. She is also Adjunct Professor of Foresight, Entrepreneurship & Intangible Capital at ISTIA (University of Angers, France) and Fellow at the World Futures Studies Federation. She is on the Editorial Boards of Futures, Foresight, and JFS and is former President of the WFSF. She also served as the Vice-President of the Center for Transcultural Foresight, Inc., Washington DC. A member of both the Association of Professional Futurists and the World Future Society, she earned her Master’s in Public Policy and International Affairs at Institut d’Etudes politiques de Strasbourg, France in 1983 and her Ph.D. in Foresight in Social Sciences at the Gregorian University of Rome.

Faith Popcorn

CEO, BrainReserve

Faith Popcorn is a best-selling author of The Popcorn Report, Clicking, EVEolution, Dictionary of the Future, and upcoming, Popcorn Report 2020: A Leap of Faith. She is founder and CEO of Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, a futurist marketing consultancy. The New York Times has called her “The Trend Oracle,” Fortune magazine named her, “The Nostradamus of Marketing,” and she is recognized as America’s foremost Trend expert. Her FutureView, which focuses on how Trends are affecting consumer lifestyles and purchasing behavior, has been presented to thousands of audiences across the globe. Heralded for her extraordinary ability to forecast emerging consumer patterns, Faith is frequently interviewed and cited in the media in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, “The Today Show,” “Face the Nation,” and CNN.

Gayemarie Brown

CEO + Founder, Wintam Place Consulting

Gayemarie Brown is a recognized digital transformation leader who builds companies by applying next generation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Cognitive computing/analytics, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain to create new markets and manage disruption. As CEO and Founder of Wintam Place Consulting she is a seasoned executive, leader and board member and/or advisor for multiple start-ups. A keynote speaker on Artificial Intelligence & Innovation and the Future of Digital Transformation she speaks to various subjects such as exponential technologies, digital disruption and the impacts of artificial intelligence. One of the top female futurists in the world, she was invited to the National Privy Council and Cabinet’s national Innovation conference to share her views on the criticality of understanding Artificial Intelligence.

Geci Karuri-Sebina

Scholar-Practitioner, Urban Planning + Governance

Geci Karuri-Sebina is a Johannesburg-based scholar-practitioner who mainly works on urban planning and governance issues with two decades of experience on a range of development foresight, policy, innovation and practice topics, particularly relating to cities and local systems.  She is currently an Associate of South African Cities Network, Visiting Research Fellow with the Wits School of Governance, and National Organizer of the Civic Tech Innovation Network in South Africa. Previously she worked with South Africa’s National Treasury Neighbourhood Development Partnership Grant programme, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Advanced Policy Institute. She holds Masters’ degrees in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA, and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

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Heather E. McGowan

Partner + Future of Work Strategist, ImpactEleven

Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) World. As a keynote speaker, Heather gives lucidity to complex topics through her research rich, graphic frameworks and powerful metaphors. In 2017, LinkedIn ranked her as its number one global voice for education. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman describes her as “the oasis” the future of work. McGowan is the coauthor of The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020).

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Ida Hult

Founder, On the Other Side of the Hill Agency

Ida Hult is a Swedish ethnographer, futurologist and change agent. She specializes in strategic insight and transformation and work as an executive advisor, board member and keynote speaker or wherever she can surprise business perspectives and stress test strategies. She was responsible for IKEAs global attention-makers within foresight and has an agency background including founding an and running one of her own. Ida brings cross-industry expertise in strategic vision work for companies such as Ericsson, IKEA, Skanska, SEB, Carlsberg and Arla Foods.

https://www.idahult.com/

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Ivy Mahsciao

CEO, evrmore.io

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Jennifer M Gidley

Adjunct Professor, Institute for Sustainable Futures

Jennifer Gidley is a Professional (Psychologist & Educator) and Academic Researcher with forty years of experience raising awareness about why we need humans, not robots, to navigate complex, volatile, global futures and how to educate for wisdom. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor, Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS, Sydney; an Adjunct Professor, Southern Cross University, NSW; a Fellow of the Botin Centre, Santander, Spain; and co-founded the Oceanic Research Institute (ORI). Formerly, she was Visiting Fellow at SciencesPo, Paris, France, President of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). Gidley serves on editorial boards of several academic journals and has published over 50 academic papers, and several books including: "The Future: A Very Short Introduction” and "Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures”.

Joana Lenkova

Futurology Director at Creative Play Lab, LEGO Group

Joana Lenkova has 15 years of international experience in the field of Marketing, Innovation, Business Strategy, and Strategic Foresight. Until 2019, Lenkova held a Consumer Strategy role at The Walt Disney Company and she headed up the UK Strategic Foresight team of Futurists, part of Walt Disney International. Last year, she founded Futures Forward Ltd, a strategy and futures consultancy company, working with international clients across the public and private sector, and partnering with The Futures School, USA to bring foresight trainings to Europe. A graduate of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in Strategy and Innovation, she is also a founding member of the Global Foresight Advisory Council of The Futures School, the Association of Professional Futurists and the Oxford Union.

Jody Turner

Global Strategic Manager + Founder, Culture of Future

As a designer, trendwatcher, artist, author and movement creative, Jody has designed a unique career embracing the influence of creative culture and the future of culture that feeds our world. As one of the first female speakers in future-leaning trend insight, she drives modern practices for companies, agencies, foundations and Fortune 100/500 clients through expertise in consumer insight, strategic design, influential communications and global workshops. For many years Jody worked as a trend watcher for the company, agency and foundation called Trendwatching, understanding and influencing toward future betterment.

https://www.jodyturner.com/ 

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Joyce Gioia

President, Herman Group

Joyce Gioia is a Strategic Business Futurist concentrating on workforce and workplace with an emphasis on what employers must do to attract, optimize, and hold onto their best employees, as well as consumer, education, and business-to-business trends. Gioia is President of The Herman Group, with a wide range corporate, trade association and governmental clients on an international basis. She is also a Founding Member of the Association of Professional Futurists as well as being an active Professional Member of the National Speakers Association and The World Future Society. With a bachelor's degree in languages and communications from The University of Denver and a masters in Business Administration (specializing in Marketing) from Fordham University, she also holds masters degrees in Theology and Counseling from The New Seminary.

Karen Sands

Founder + CEO, Future by Design Institute & The Ageless Way Academy

Karen Sands is a multiple Amazon #1 bestseller author of 11 books and journals. She is a serial social entrepreneur, CEC-board certified and ICF-certified master coach, invited vetted master coach and mentor for TED fellows, visionary mentor, consultant, and sought-after public speaker. One of Corporate America’s first intrapreneurs and a pioneer in the coaching industry, she is also the leading GeroFuturistTM, midlife and Boomer expert, and expert authority on women 40+ who believes passionately in the unlimited potential associated with the Longevity Economy, the Business of Aging (aka: GeroBusinessTM) and Ageless Aging. Sands contributed to the White House Task Force on Innovative Learning, the Hudson Institute’s landmark study, Workforce 2000, as well as its sequel: Workforce 2020, and has been invited to sit on Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women’s Advisory Council.

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Leah Zaidi

Founder, Multiverse Design

Leah is an award-winning futurist and the founder of Multiverse Design, a Toronto-based foresight consultancy. She combines strategy and science fiction to create future-proof innovations, design preferred state business models, and construct pathways for complex organizational change. She has worked with and for a variety of startups, arts and culture, financial services, academia, government, corporate, and not-for-profit organizations, including TIFF, UNESCO, and Gensler. Leah creates story-based experiential futures to challenge conventional thinking, communicate complex ideas, and pull the future into the present. She is also the founder of the Toronto chapter of Speculative Futures.

Lisa Bodell

CEO, FutureThink

Lisa Bodell is an award-winning author and CEO of FutureThink. As a futurist and expert on the topic of innovation and simplicity, she serves as a global council member of the World Economic Forum. She is an inspired global speaker who has brought her message to over 30 countries and nearly 100,000 people each year and the author of two award winning, best-selling books: "Why Simple Wins" and "Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution", which won the 2019 North American Book Award for Best Business Book. Bodell is an advisor on the boards of the Association of Professional Futurists; and Novartis’ Diversity and Inclusion Board in Basel, Switzerland. Among her many academic activities, Lisa has taught innovation and creativity at both American and Fordham Universities.

FutureThink

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Maddy Dychtwald

Co-Founder, Age Wave

A successful entrepreneur, Maddy Dychtwald co-founded Age Wave, the world’s leader in understanding and addressing the far-reaching impacts of our aging population. Age Wave have worked with more than half of the Fortune 500 in industries ranging from healthcare and medical technology to financial services and consumer marketing, on how the age wave is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, our world, and our lives. Her books include: "Cycles: How We Will Live, Work, and Buy”; and "Influence: How Women’s Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better".  She and her husband Ken were recently awarded the prestigious Esalen Prize for their outstanding contributions to advancing the human potential of aging men and women worldwide.

Maree Conway

Founder, Foresight Futures

Maree Conway discovered what foresight was in 1999 and subsequently worked in two universities to help use foresight in strategy development. Her University Futures website was launched in 2006 and Thinking Futures in 2007.  Her focus is working with people who are open to generating new ways of thinking about the future, and to translate that thinking into more meaningful and useful strategic decisions by building adaptive mindsets that shape their capacity to be futures ready. Conway is Founding Partner, Centre for Australian Foresight, and formerly Executive Director of the Association for Tertiary Education Management, General Manager Quality, Information and Planning, at Victoria University. Director Foresight, Planning and Review at the Swinburne University of Technology with a PhD in Foresight, as well as a Master of Educational Administration (Honors) with the University of New England.

Maria Konovalenko

Operations + Strategy, SonoThera

Maria Konovalenko is studying biology of aging in a joint PhD program between University of Southern California and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Her research is focused on aging of stem cells in respiratory epithelium. Maria has been involved in fighting aging since 2008. She is one of the organizers of the Genetics of Aging and Longevity Conference series. Maria was part of team at the science for Life Extension Foundation, a Moscow-based non-profit, since 2008 to 2016 and has been raising funding for longevity and regenerative medicine research from both government and private sources. Maria's background is in molecular biophysics, she got both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Maria's goal is to make people live as long and as healthy as possible using the advances of science and technology.

Marianna Mazzucato

Renowned Global Economist + Professor, UCL

Marianna Mazzucato is a world renowned economist and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and Founder/Director of UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Her focus is on the relationship between innovation and the direction of growth, working with global leaders on ‘mission oriented’ policies, which can steer solutions towards grand challenges by rethinking the public sector’s role to ensure growth is more innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable. She co-edited the book "Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth”, bringing new economic thinking to drive more effective economic policies. Her 2018 book, "The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy", brings the debate about value back to the heart of economics to ensure we are rewarding value creation over value extraction and destruction.

Marina Gorbis

Executive Director, Institute for the Future

Marina Gorbis is Executive Director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a 50-year old non-profit research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. She has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, philanthropy, and civic society. Marina’s current research focuses on transformations in the world of work and new forms of value creation. She launched the Workable Futures Initiative at IFTF with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of new work patterns and to prototype a generation of Positive Platforms for work. She has introduced the concept of Universal Basic Assets (UBA) as a framework for thinking about different types of assets and the role they play in economic security. The UBA framework also highlights at a variety of approaches and tools we can use to achieve wider asset distribution and greater equity.

Maya Van Leemput

President, Agence Future

Maya Van Leemput is a professional futurist combining research and consultancy with a co-creative multi-media practice. She is Lector Senior Researcher in Futures Research at the Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel. Maya completed her Ph.D. research at the University of Westminster with a thesis on ‘Visions of the Future on Television‘. She taught ‘Methods for Social Sciences’ at the University of Westminster and the City University and worked at the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World. Post-doctoral research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with a Prospective Research grant from Innoviris followed. Her consultancy focuses on foresight in the fields of science, technology, culture and development. Clients include the King Baudouin Foundation, EPTA, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp, MAS|Erfgoedcel Antwerpen, Prospekta, CultuurNet, Brussels Kunsten Overleg, Maison des Cultures et Cohesion Social de Molenbeek, COST. Maya is a member of the World Futures Studies Federation, the interdisciplinary visual arts collective OST and the Association of Professional Futurists.

Mei Mei Song

Director, Center for Futures Intelligence & Research

Director at Center for Futures Intelligence and Research (CFAR), Tamkang University.

Nancy Giordano

Founder + CEO, Play Big, Inc.

nancygiordano.com
playbiginc.com

Nur Anisah Abdullah

Senior Teaching Fellow, Strathclyde Business School

Dr Anisah is Senior Teaching Fellow at the Strathclyde Business School. She is Co-Editor of World Futures Review, an international journal of strategic foresight. She founded Futures Sandbox an independent non-profit community learning platform for Futures Studies , an initiative for transformative action learning and youth development. She teaches courses in the MBA strategy module and supervise postgraduate research projects. She has been an educator since 1994, and her research focuses on futures of education, business performance and foresight for strategy development.

Pupul Bisht

Foresight Director, N Square + Founder, Decolonizing the Future

Pupul is a multi-disciplinary designer and futurist and the Winner of the Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award 2018. Her practice is rooted in human-centred insights and lies at the intersection of futures thinking, design, and participatory research. She founded the Decolonizing Futures Initiative in 2018— a global project that aims to engage marginalized communities in imagining their preferred futures. Through this initiative, Pupul is pioneering the use of her novel foresight method inspired by the Kaavad folk-storytelling tradition of Rajasthan, India— one of the first and only foresight methods directly derived from a non-western tradition. With a belief that the stories we tell of our pasts shape our futures, Pupul has dedicated her multidisciplinary creative practice to uncovering narratives of alternative histories and marginalized futures that otherwise lie in under-explored nooks of our everyday world. Through the use of storytelling as a tool, she hopes to move foresight outside organizational confines and engage in mass dialogue about our collective future as a civilization.

Puruesh Chaudhary

Founder + Chief Strategy Officer, AGAHI

Puruesh Chaudhary is a futures researcher, development and strategic communication professional. She has a professional master’s degree in International Negotiation and Policymaking from Institut De Hautes Études Internationales Et Du Développement in Geneva. Her work mostly involves foresight research, knowledge-collaborations and content intelligence. She has worked with multilateral donors and aid agencies, news organizations and multinationals in Pakistan. She is the Founder and President of AGAHI, a non-governmental organization, which works extensively on creating platforms based on knowledge collaboration and information sharing initiatives. Pakistan Foresight Initiative, brainchild of of AGAHI is developing frameworks to improve policymaking and strategic narratives; structures enabling legislators, strategists, academicians and the community developing shared understanding for effective implementation of decisions. She has produced foresight research compilation on the Future of Pakistan up to 2060 and is a published authored for ‘The Future of Business’ a critical insight on rapidly changing world. Championing “Shaping the future of journalism”, Chaudhary has co-founded Pakistan’s annual journalism awards (The Agahi Awards); content analysis framework (Media Credibility Index and Ethical Media Audit); created foresight research fellowship opportunities; and developed academic-industry linkages. The Center of International Media Ethics’ honored her to serve as its Ambassador to Pakistan campaigning for quality journalism in the country. She is currently Member Board of Advisors for CIME and is a Mentor for UN-Habitat Youth Fund Programme. She continues to train and mentor journalists all across Pakistan on values and ethics. Chaudhary is the youngest Alumnae at the National Defence University in Pakistan and has also been recognized as a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum. She is an ASPEN Alumni, a member of the World Futures Society and is on the Planning Committee of the Millennium-Project (Global Futures Studies and Research) representing the Pakistan Chair. Read Less...

Riane Eisler

President, Center for Partnership Systems + World-Renowned Author

Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. President of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) she pioneered of the expansion of human rights theory and action to include: women, children and nature. The only woman among 20 major thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, and Marx in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, recognized for the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. Her many honors, include honorary PhDs, the Nuclear Age Peace Leadership Award, the Feminist Pioneer award, and inclusion in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of twenty leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.

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Samar Hechaime

Co-Founder + Chief Strategic Officer, Agora Envisioning

Samar Hechaime's focus is on enabling leaders to achieve strategic transformation and on shaping thriving futures, economically and beyond, through multidisciplinary human-centric disruption, and to challenge established models by putting people at the centre of successful strategies and profitable systems. Hechaime has worked on various projects which have included the reimagining of the healthcare model of the Henry Fords Hospitals for the Saudi Market, creating an engagement strategy for the Ministry of Planning and Economics in Saudi Arabia, redesigning the offering a unit at on of the Big Four and helping the Human Resource Development Fund in the Saudi Ministry of Labour to redefine service delivery for the changing labour force.

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Sarah DaVanzo

Chief Data Officer, Pierre Fabre Group

Sarah DaVanzo has spent her international career, spanning 12 countries over 20 years, at the intersection of: innovation; marketing and branding; trends and culture; insights and foresight. Building and leading teams for F500 brands and marketing services agencies, the gestalt of Sarah is of a charismatic, creative and curious inventor and problem solver, energizing leader, and intrepid experimenter with exceptional foresight skills. Sarah is also a serial entrepreneur and an inventor of cultural intelligence, foresight and Innovation methodologies and holds three patents. She is trained in Building Innovation Ecosystems (MIT) and methods to build Exponential Innovation (Singularity University). She has a MsEd from Pace University focused on methods to stimulate curiosity and exploration, as well as a Senior Executive Diploma from Harvard Business School. She is currently working on researching and testing various methods to engineer curiosity to improve insights discovery and Innovation output.

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Sari Stenfors

Executive Director, Augmented Leadership Institute

Sari has founded over 20 new businesses. In addition, she is an advisor and a board member for several start-up companies focused on innovative business ideas. She has over 15 years of executive experience in health care, retail, advertising, entertainment and ICT sectors. Her PhD in Business from Aalto University is in the field of Strategic Management and Business Technology. Her 15 years of consulting experience concentrate on strategy level improvements in client organizations. She is especially keen on disruptive business concepts and teaches Innovative Entrepreneurship in fragile countries, such as Afghanistan. Sari is passionate about helping our society to take a leap to the future. She believes that we can use the emerging technologies to create change for good. For three decades she has been doing anthropological studies in cyborg colonies. She designs tools and systems, which create both more effective and more fulfilling organizational behavior and happier humans.

Shara Evans

Founder + CEO, Market Clarity

Shara Evans is also the Founder and CEO of Market Clarity, an award-winning technology analyst firm that provides insight, intelligence and advice on all aspects of the telecom and emerging technologies markets, as well as the Founder of Telsyte (which she sold to publicly listed UXC), and has been providing innovative research and strategic consulting on telecoms and technology throughout her successful career. Shara has a long history of working with top scientific research organisations. She was a member of the CeNTIE (CSIRO Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy), Advisory Board from 2002 – 2007, as well as being an Advisor to the Director of the Networking Technologies Laboratory within CSIRO’s ICT Centre. Most recently she served as a member of the Expert Review Panel for the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI), a collaborative research initiative by the CSIRO in partnership with NICTA, with foundation funding provided by the NSW Government. Frequently working with executive, strategy and product teams, Shara gets organizations to think outside the box of what’s available today to imagine the world in 10 – 20 years, and assists them in commercializing these concepts into innovative new products and services.

Sheryl Connelly

Chief Futurist, General Motors

Sheryl Connelly has served as Ford Motor Company’s futurist for more than a decade. She is responsible for identifying global trends, exploring potential implications and cascading these insights on futuring to organizations throughout the company, including design, product development and corporate strategy. She is a member of the Global Advisory Council on transportation for the World Economic Forum. Fast Company magazine named her one of the Most Creative People in Business in 2013 and 2015. Connelly has been a featured speaker at TED Global, appeared on CBS This Morning , CNBC’s Fast Money and NPR’s All Things Considered with Robert Siegel. Before working for Ford, she practiced law. In addition to a juris doctorate, Connelly holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and a master’s in business administration. When her schedule permits, she teaches design research at Center for Creative Studies in Detroit.

Sierra Modro

Director of Engineering, Kiddom

Tamsin Woolley-Barker

Founder + Principal, TEEM Innovation Group

Founder and Principal of TEEM Innovation Group, best-selling author and evolutionary Biologist + Anthropologist, Tamsin provides organizational design and innovation consulting for some of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies. She is the Dean of Geoversity’s School of Biocultural Leadership in Panama, Chairs David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution Institute Business Action Group (leading the effort to design Living System curricula for business schools), and is a headline thought leader for the Growth Institute––the premier education platform for mid-cap entrepreneurs. All are aimed at catalyzing a fundamental paradigm shift from mechanistic design to Living Systems Thinking and Design in all human endeavors. 

TEEM Innovation Group

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Tanja Schindler

Founder, Tanja Futurer Me

Tanja Schindler is a passionate futurist and has international experience in foresight, innovation, leadership and strategy. She holds a double master’s degree MBA / Master of Strategic Foresight from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Through her international experience and the use of Foresight, she sees the world from different perspectives and enables her audience to rethink. Her focus is on emphasising the advantages of the futures mindset in the areas of strategy, innovation and leadership and understanding foresight as a holistic, sustainable and targeted organisational orientation. She has over ten years of professional experience in corporate, startups, and as a freelancer. She is the founder and guardian of the Futures Space network - a collaborative network of futurists and thought leaders to master future challenges and test the future of work together with companies.

Tessa Finlev

Foresight Strategist, Dolby Labs

As a foresight strategist for Dolby Labs, Tessa Finlev uses futures thinking as a tool to build collaborative structures for company engagement. Innovation, vision, strategy, transformation, and change need to be guided by the future, and only by engaging as many people as possible will the work that is being done today successfully transform to the work that needs to be done for the emergent future.

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Tracey Follows

Founder, Futuremade

Tracey is an award-winning Futurist, and Founder of Futuremade which consults with global brands like Google, Diageo, Virgin, and Sky. She specializes in the application of foresight to boost business, helping clients understand the next generation of consumerism and make decisions with the future in mind. A regular keynote speaker all around the world she works in areas as diverse as the future of luxury, retail, media, cities, gender, work, defense, justice, entertainment, and AI ethics, decoding what future trends mean for businesses, brands, and organizations. Tracey is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the World Futures Studies Federation, a Fellow of RSA and a Forbes contributor.

Ufuk Tarhan

President, Digital Agency

Futurist, Economist, President of Digital Agency. Graduated from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Department of Economics. Since 1982, she has worked as a top executive, general manager and board member in various companies and industries mainly in IT & telecommunications. In 2002, she was awarded as “The Most Successful Businesswoman In The IT Industry”. She founded M-GEN Future Planning Center in 2006 & M-GEN Sowtware & Digital Communication Services Ltd in 2011. She is ranked among Futurist Influencers , “All Futurists” Google Serach, “Forbes 50 Leading Female Futurists” top 100 female futurists in the world lists and known as business designer and avatar. Gives conferences and lectures like “How To Create A Better Future?” “Be a T-Human”, “Get Prepared for Digital, AI, Robotic, Energy Revolutions’ Future”etc. She is first members and former president of the Futurists Society (TFD) in Turkey and still the only woman futurist keynote speaker, moderator and facilitator in Turkey. She is one of the well known bloggers and shown in lists like “among 30 social influencers, and writes articles on various online & offline business magazines. She is lecturing on “Future Studies” in METU and various universities. Currently, she has gained the master degree in “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” at Bahcesehir University and plans to prepare for a doctorate. She is also the member of World Future Society, Association of Professional Futurists, Kagider Board Member, Futurists Association High Advisory Board Member, 2009-2012 President. She has written the preface for the Futurist Dr. Verne Wheelwright’s book “O Senin Geleceğin – It’s your Future and contributed to the translation into Turkish.. She is the author of two books. 1-“Your Dream Future” about future planning for high school students and 2- Winner of the Most Successful Innovative Business Book Award (2017) “T-Human” about the successful human model of the future for adults and young adults.

Wendy Schultz

Director, Infinite Futures

Dr. Schultz is an academically trained futurist with over thirty-five years of global foresight practice. She has designed futures research projects for NGOs, government agencies, and businesses, and recently completed 4 global scenarios and multiple regional scenarios on the futures of research and innovation in a post-COVID world. 

Wendy specializes in participatory futures workshops – most recently online for the ILO and for Edinburgh Napier University; other examples include face-to-face workshops offering foresight training in Kuala Lumpur; at A Temporary Futures Institute at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp; In Cairo for the ILO; for Africa Knows in Arusha, Tanzania; with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Bangkok, New York, and Geneva; and in Budapest for Vodafone. These workshops are exploratory, provocative, and creative.  

Wendy teaches futures studies in the Masters Program in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston; is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Post-Normal Policy and Futures Studies; a Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy; a member of the Association of Professional Futurists; and a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation.

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Youngsook Park

CEO, Awakening Health Korea

Youngsook Park is a leading futurist from South Korea. She serves as Chair of Millennium Project Korea Node. She also represents several global futures research organizations such as TechCastGlobal, and Davinci Institute. She has been Information Officer of the British Embassy Seoul (1982–2000) and Director of Public Diplomacy of the Australian Embassy Seoul (2000–2010) where she was trained as a futurist by attending World Future Society conferences, and other futurists meetings. Park is known for bringing global futurists to Korea for the last 30 years, and is a co-organizer of Korea Future Forum along with News1, a Korean news agency, inviting famous futurists to Seoul to speak on futures.

Yvette Montero Salvatico

Co-Founder, The Futures School

Yvette is an experienced and engaging speaker who is unique in her ability to transport audiences into the future. Holding a bachelor’s degree in Finance and an MBA from the University of Florida, Yvette has over 15 years of corporate experience with large, multi-national firms such as Kimberly-Clark and The Walt Disney Company. At The Walt Disney Company, Yvette led the effort to establish Future Workforce Insights to identify future workforce trends and leverage foresight models and techniques to assess potential threats and impacts, emerging ideas, and exciting opportunities for the organization. In her current role as a partner at Kedge – a strategic design, foresight, and innovation firm – Yvette utilizes extensive research and customized toolkits to service a diverse global client base. She nurtures strong relationships with her clients and challenges them to foster new ways of thinking.

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Zahara Chetty

Project Manager, The Good Future Project

Zahara Chetty is an Educationist, Writer, Facilitator, Fashion Designer and Coach. She grew up in Apartheid South Africa and works remotely with teams all around the world to help individuals, CEOs, startups, social enterprises, governments and organizations navigate complexity and develop more conscious and collaborative solutions for the future. She recently founded the African Futures Academy, an online learning space and educational support materials, that aim to help children in Africa develop the right mindsets and skillsets to imagine, collaborate and actively participate in creating more equitable futures for themselves and their communities. She has a special interest in cognition, trauma and conscious evolution in a time where technology threatens to outpace human development.

http://zaharachetty.com/

http://africanfuturesacademy.com/

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