Anamaria Aristizabal is a Master Certified Coach (MCC), Facilitator, Author, and Change Agent. She is the founder of Re-Vision Academy, which offers a new approach to purpose, leadership, and human development. She also works with New Ventures West, a world class coaching school, as a coach and coach trainer. She is an Art of Hosting practitioner…
Ciku Kimeria is an author, journalist, communication and strategy specialist, adventurer and travel writer. She writes both fiction and non-fiction focusing on African stories that need telling. She is the current Quartz Africa Editor and a longtime contributor to Quartz, having authored almost 60 articles for the site, on topics as wide-ranging as the perils of…
Jessi Bellama is a strategy and design leader with 20 years’ experience creating direction from uncertainty for growing and changing organizations using Human-Centered Design and a shared value lens. She deeply believes in creating a world where organizations embody human and societal thriving to achieve purpose-driven goals. Jessi has crisscrossed the private, public and nonprofit sectors…
After 20 years working in over 45 countries managing large projects in industry and sustainable development, Nadene Canning created a boutique consultancy designing learning strategies to accelerate innovation, performance and impact. At the same time, her passion project in Switzerland involved shining a light on the lack of equity, diversity and inclusion in the Swiss workplace. Her…
Joey Leskin is a Masters-educated Leadership Consultant from London who designs and facilitates experiential and educational workshops for audiences across the globe. He specializes in communication skills, remote work methodologies and team development, and has worked with numerous non-profits and startups. His focus is on empowering early-stage professionals, early-stage managers and those working cross-culturally, having had travel experience in…
Carlos Gaviria has more than 25 years of experience facilitating group processes with individual contributors, middle and senior management. He has a lot of experience and learning in Experiential Education, Team Coaching, Consultative Sales, Strategic Planning and Leadership, in Colombia, Spain, Panama and Venezuela, creating spaces for learning and personal growth. Carlos has been Director…
Laura Ines Romero is a change agent who combines deep questions and creativity to drive the deep changes needed at individuals, leaders, teams and cultural levels. She is focused in creating powerful employee engagement experiences, developing impactful leaders and empowering virtual and multicultural teams with more than 10+ yrs as a leader, change agent, coach…
Carmen Franco is passionate about co-creating transformative experiences with her clients, helping organizations and leaders explore their potential to increase their impact. Using her varied background and experiences in start-ups, Fortune 500 corporations, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations. Carmen is committed to enhancing organizations, your practice, team, and/or company via 1:1 and/or team coaching —…
Mark Hecker is a social worker and educator with varied and extensive leadership experience. A former DC Social Worker of the Year, Mark’s work has been recognized by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Aspen Institute. As the Founding Executive Director of Reach Incorporated, Mark built and led an innovative and impactful organization that won…
We are expert facilitators from around the world united by our passion for making collaboration work when “messy human stuff”—egos, cultural differences, miscommunication—create silos that put your mission at risk.
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Alexandra (Alex) Gaspar Martins Teixeira (she/her) is a collective intelligence enthusiast, master facilitator and technical strategist with over 25 years of experience designing and facilitating participatory meetings and convenings for high-performing teams and organizational collaboratives including FHI 360, Ipas, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Urgent Action Fund, the World Health Organization and UNFPA among others.
Prior to consulting, Alex spent 11 years advancing access to safe abortion at Ipas where she partnered with global teams and led organization-wide initiatives as a Senior Advisor for Technical Innovation and Excellence, the Associate Director for Community
Engagement and Policy Advocacy and as the Senior Advisor for Organizational Learning. Alex has also served as the Philanthropic Partnerships Officer for the Astraea Foundation, as a Global Research & Policy Advisor for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (now OutRight Action International) and as a Program Fellow with the Global Fund for Women. She has served on the board of directors of the Safe Abortion Action Fund (UK), The Stone House (NC), the Third Wave Foundation (NY) and Resource Generation (NY).
Alex has designed and led over 70 high-stakes participatory workshops, retreats and convenings for over 2000 stakeholders across Africa, Asia and North America. She is among the most seasoned facilitators, globally, of Abortion Values Clarification for Action & Transformation (VCAT) Workshops where she has led community members, activists, health care providers, ministry officials, multilateral donors and embassies—all with wide ranging positions on abortion—through a process that shifts their orientation from one of contentious debate to an opportunity for empathy and principled collaboration to advance bodily autonomy. She has trained and mentored over 150 emerging facilitators
and team leaders globally on designing and facilitating inclusive, liberatory and participatory meetings.
With two decades of experience advancing equity and justice through philanthropy and global health programming, Alex approaches facilitation as a strategic opportunity to practice high-impact, equity-based collaboration skills that live on beyond our convenings. Alex brings skillful attention to transforming personal, interpersonal and systemic barriers to meaningful participation. She is passionate about helping groups connect, navigate principled disagreement, prioritize, focus, and align towards powerful actions that advance justice, joy and wellbeing in the world.
Alex is a recipient of the Wildacres Leadership Initiative William C. Friday Fellowship (2014-2016), holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and French Literature from Connecticut College and a master’s degree in International Affairs with a focus on gender, sexuality and international human rights from Columbia University. As the first member of her family to attend university, she is humbled to stand on the shoulders of self-taught entrepreneurs, savvy dissidents, survivors of Portuguese dictatorship and lovers of learning. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, in the Southeastern United States, in a beloved cross-class, multi-racial intentional community of gorgeously imperfect humans trying to build deep interdependence.
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION, CHANGE MANAGEMENT, CULTURE CHANGE TEAMBUILDING
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Systems change, Change management, Culture change
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Change management; Culture change; Strategy; Teambuilding
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION, STRATEGY SYSTEMS CHANGE, PRODUCT OR SERVICE DESIGN
Ángel Zambrano Cobo is Communications Specialist at UFacilitate. As a communicator and cultural manager based in Caracas, Venezuela, he collaborates with groups and organizations that seek to build community and generate change through projects of social innovation, cultural action and human rights.
He is also a founding member of Ciudad Laboratorio (@ciudlab), a civil association that seeks to influence urban experience and transformation through observation, art and pedagogy. In 2017 he was part of the founding team of Labo Ciudadano, a social innovation lab focused on human rights, social fabric and nonviolent mobilization. Until mid-2022 he was co-general coordinator of this organization, and today he is part of its advisory board.
Leigh has an extensive experience in business process management. She has worked with BP and KPO business that caters to international professionals through identifying methods to discover, mode, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes.
She started as a customer care representative while studying in college and after earning a bachelor’s degree in business management from Central Philippine University, Leigh worked as a virtual assistant to US professionals. By this time, she already assisted top-tier management with company materials, workflows, training and finance. Working her way up to the management level, Leigh handled different teams in fields like real estate, medical, construction and cleaning.
Leigh also has experience working with sales and marketing as a sales executive closing service deals and also had experience working as an events support generalist to a KPO company that provides shared services across the globe.
Aparna is Chief Facilitator Builder at UFacilitate, helping to select and onboard high-quality facilitators to the UFacilitate family. For the last 7 years, she has been working with early growth stage impact startups across India, South Africa, and Latin America, helping them identify the business models and value propositions, create a growth strategy, raise funds and measure their impact. During her time working with education nonprofits in India, she learned about the critical role that good facilitation plays in ensuring meaningful engagements and also got trained by the Facilitators Network Singapore. While working with an accelerator in Latin America, she created a facilitator’s handbook for online and offline engagements, equipping the reader with the basic tools and thinking steps.
Aparna’s aim through UFacilitate is to take the simple handbook many steps ahead and help leaders in the impact space innovate effectively, make decisions, and build projects that involve multiple stakeholders and have large-scale impact.
