Alex Handfinger, MPH, MPS, is the Nutrition Outreach Manager at the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance. He is responsible for recruitment, training, and retention of statewide partner organizations seeking to implement evidence-based nutrition education. He believes that equity, democratic participation, and organizational culture are the too-often overlooked essential elements to success. As a food baby born…
Beth is an internationally recognized thought leader in networks, digital transformation, philanthropy, wellbeing in the workplace and training. Beth has over 35 years working in the nonprofit sector in capacity building and has facilitated trainings for thousands of social change activists and nonprofits on every continent in the world. She is an in-demand keynote speaker…
Brooking Gatewood helps leaders and groups clarify and enact the change they want in themselves, in their workplaces, and in our shared world. As a process designer, facilitator, collaboration coach and strategist, her work is rooted in the belief that we must co-liberate individual agency and collective capacity to truly change systems and culture. Brooking…
Judy Watts is a doctoral candidate in the school of communication at The Ohio State University where she studies the persuasive effects of entertainment and narratives on individuals. More specifically, she studies children’s learning from educational media and adult attitudes on social topics as a result of media exposure. Judy is primarily a quantitative researcher…
Mara D’Amico is an experienced facilitation consultant, having worked with a diverse range of partners to achieve their goals by designing and facilitating events where participants connect in thoughtful and engaging ways. She has built meetings and events through a participatory model with nonprofit organizations, government agencies, colleges and universities, community groups, faith-based organizations, corporations,…
Michael Brouri is an experienced facilitation consultant with more than a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector and higher education. Michael specializes in meeting design, facilitation, and coaching using Liberating Structures and has recently worked with clients including the White House, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Crystal Bridges Museum of American…
Nate Stephens is an organizational change facilitator and systems convener with a passion for challenging power dynamics and bringing diverse groups together. Nate has worked in diverse sectors and communities to develop participatory and iterative processes, with experience working with teams, offices, multinational organizations, and international networks. Nate currently manages the Anchor Collaborative Network at…
Paul Tevis found his passion for coaching and facilitation in an unusual place – software development. Paul began his career as a software engineer, where he realized the most difficult problems to solve were not technical ones. The real challenges he saw arose from the question of how groups could work together effectively. Through his…
Steve Brigham has been a leader in the public engagement and multi-stakeholder collaboration field over the past nineteen years, first in his role as COO and then President of AmericaSpeaks, and now as one of three principals in Public Engagement Associates. In that time, he has led or managed more than 250 public and multi-stakeholder…
Virginia helps audacious, socially conscious leaders to develop a System Thinking Leadership Style they can bring about the impact they seek in their organizations and society while achieving personal, financial and professional freedom. System Thinking approaches allow you unleash collective intelligence and creativity to solve highly complex problems, to promote a culture of learning and…
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.
