Over the past 19 years I have been working as a founder, creator, designer, and project developer. I’m a moderator and facilitator of participatory and collaborative design processes. As a permaculture designer I understand how to design complex sustainable systems. As a philosopher, theorist and intellectual I work on the theory and methodology of cocreative processes and transformative practice, steadily seeking options that allow us to develop the collective intelligence that is necessary to design the world we live in, in different and better ways.
Since 2008, I have been the co-founder and executive director of the Institute for Participatory Design, and am also the founder of the German Permaculture Institute (Permakultur Akademie Deutschland). I studied at London Guildhall University, University of Trier and University of Oldenburg, and was an associate of the Research Training Group on “Technification and Society” at University of Darmstadt. I’ve furthermore received scholarships from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schumacher College and the Future Global Leader Award by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
I am co-founder of d.quarks, a platform for corporate and societal digital transformation. I accompany cross-industry family businesses, large enterprises and start-ups in Germany and Europe transitioning into the digital age. In doing so, I combine perspectives and approaches that change culture with those changing technology. My talent lies in seeing concrete connections, dependencies and patterns between people, organizations, processes and technology.
I have in-depth experience in management and technology consulting as well as in the industry. For me, the human being is at the center of the transformation work and my goal is to get people out of their comfort zone and finally discard old traditional patterns of behavior. As a studied geographer, I’m interested in changes of perspective and border crossings between business, politics, science, and civil society.
I’m also a lecturer at Goethe Business School Frankfurt for digital transformation management, a keynote speaker at zukunftsInstitut, and co-authored the book „d.quarks – The Path to Digital Business“ (Management Book of the Year in 2016).
These will activate the collective intelligence of millions of people. Together with everyone at Mehr Demokratie e.V., a member of Democracy International, I want to use all my strength to advance our democratic political system. In times of Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan we should know what’s at stake.
Born in 1966 and originally working in the IT sector I have been on the national board of Mehr Demokratie e.V. since 1996 and its CEO since 2001. I live in the community project Schloss Tempelhof of which I am a co-founder and which I have helped to get off the ground.
ANDREA HUFELAND
THERAPIST, NETWORKER, POLITICIAN, UTOPIAN HUMAN BEING
As a therapist, I have spent 30 years supporting families in times of crisis, providing space and guidance for individual life paths and helping them to rethink their perspectives and habits. In doing so, I have learned how important and effective it is to move at your own pace, take detours, reach turning points, take breaks and allow sufficient space for encounters.
Since 2011, I have been active in local politics for the Green Party on the Oldenburg City Council and in working groups at the state and federal level. Driven by a radically inclusive, public-spirited and value-based attitude, I am committed to the sustainable development of a vibrant, future-proof society in which all people can live healthy lives, participate equally and realise their potential. My focus is on inclusion and culture.
I also enjoy being involved in the Food Policy Council for the agricultural and food transition and in various contexts that contribute to the transformation of our society.
I owe my personal growth to a long marriage with children, grandchildren and foster children, friends, serious illnesses in my younger years, spiritual experiences and long journeys with diverse encounters in other countries and cultures.
My work is characterised by respect, mindfulness, flexibility, stability and courage. I enjoy taking on responsibility and trust in cooperation and the competence of diversity. I firmly believe that inclusion leads to peace and understanding. I see a need to develop new forms of cooperation and to give greater importance to inner development goals alongside ecological, socio-cultural and economic sustainability goals.
THOMAS SCHINDLER
SYSTEMS-CHANGE CATALYST & FOUNDER
I empower communities, organizations, and leaders to cocreate regenerative, life-centered systems. I pioneer new frameworks that place life, creativity, and commons-based innovation at the heart of economic, social, and technological transformation.
As co-founder of delodi, I’ve launched MOTHERLAND to boost food security for smallholder farmers in Kenya, GITA to help cities source impact-driven startups, IRM to redefine market economies around regeneration, and Project MIRACLE to establish bio-regional “Miracle Factories” that unlock local material commons. Through data-driven indices, citizens’ assemblies, and cross-sector partnerships, I help translate big visions into practical pilots.
Drawing on a background in social work, audio engineering, and deep-inquiry practices like focusing, I speak and write on regenerative economics and host forums that bridge culture, policy, and technology. Guided by a strict “no a******” rule and a helogenic North Star, I facilitate mission-aligned collaborations that drive lasting systemic change.
YANTIN FLEISCHHAUER
Activist und Cocreator
I am a non-binary being on an earth where everything is connected. My passion is to connect living beings of all kinds with each other through cocreative processes and thus to create projects that carry the complexity of the world within them and bring vitality and beauty into the world.
My socio-political engagement began on the streets with Fridays For Future demos and with the experience of a year-long, cocreative process between climate activists and local politicians with the joint development of a comprehensive climate protection programme. This experience inspired me to realise the potential that can unfold through cocreation.
Since then, I have been active in various grassroots movements, in which I have not only been able to experience the utopias of tomorrow, but have also been politically educated and gained a lot of experience in grassroots democratic organisation and interpersonal and socio-political processes.
Trained as a carpenter, I am a co-founder of the Azubihilfe network, which campaigns for the improvement of training conditions and against discrimination in the trades.
I am currently studying anthropology and am gaining a deeper understanding of socio-political contexts, focusing in particular on non-Western sources of knowledge, somatic and multi-species approaches and a critical view of white supremacy culture.
I’m an entrepreneur in financial services, media, property and banking, founded Investment Banking Partners AB and served as chairman of EFG Investment Bank. In 2008, I established the Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, which aims to facilitate personal development and social change. A special focus of the foundation is supporting the development of social entrepreneurs and the understanding of the complexities of social change. The foundation operates a conference and retreat facility on its island Ekskäret in the Stockholm archipelago.
I’m also the co-founder of the research institute Perspectiva in London, of the Cocreation Foundation, the media platform Emerge in Berlin and 29k personal development platform. I’m moreover the author of three books: The Market Myth (2016), The Nordic Secret (together with Lene Rachel Andersen, 2017) and The World We Create (2019). I divide my time between London, Stockholm and Berlin.
I cocreate new methods and tools for community, personal and professional development, building i.a. on psychosynthesis plus several decades of action research. I’m an entrepreneur, former management consultant and NGO leader, Vice President of the Union of International Associations, and founder member of Legacy17 — an international not-for-profit cooperative of consultants, practitioners and educators focused on supporting the realization of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
I’m author and co-author of numerous books, including “Learning for Change” concerning a methodology for more effective learning from experience and “ESD Dialogues” on transformative pedagogy for sustainable development. I’m also a grateful recipient of the Rachel Carson Prize 2011– 2012 “for long-term efforts to involve individuals, companies and NGOs in acting sustainably”.
As the founder of the P2P Foundation, I have been observing and promoting ‚peer to peer‘ collaboration for over a decade. We have to move this very powerful form of collaboration from the grassroots to our institutions, and create ‚competent democracies‘.
After 25 years in business and government (USIA, BP, Belgacom) and the creation of two internet startups in the 90s, I took a two-year sabbatical to study historical transitions from one system to another. I researched in particular the history and evolution of the commons, i.e. shared resources that are governed in democratic ways and periodically re-emerge in human history to heal periods of human ‚over-reach‘.
In the capacity of coordinator of the P2P Foundation since 2007, I have worked on transition policies for governmental institutions that are connected to ‚peer production‘ projects worldwide and advocate the model of ‚cosmo-local production’. My last project was the labor mutual Smart.coop, active in nine countries with 20,000 cooperators, which offers new models of solidarity for autonomous workers. I furthermore authored different books, including ‘P2P – the Commons Manifesto’.
I now specialize in institutional design, looking for new cooperative models between the actively contributing citizenry, our institutions for the common good as well as ‚generative‘ market players.
Most recently, I worked in the field of philanthropy and funding. I am working with The National Lottery Community Fund to implement systems-thinking approaches to funding and reporting models and leading insight and learning at the Digital Fund. I am often hired to seed, catalyse and build new networks and communities of sensemaking and intelligence, utilising my skills in digital organising, facilitation, pattern matching and interdisciplinary sense-making. I have also worked in designing online and offline learning programmes, designing governance systems and working with organisations. I held a position as Associate Lecturer at Schumacher College on systems thinking and Gaian microbiology, I am an Advisory Board member of The International Bateson Institute, co-founder of DGOV Foundation – a community of distributed governance practitioners and a Member at Enspiral – a decentralised systems change and governance network.
All of the above would be impossible without art, creativity and playfulness to bring it alive. I explore creative and artistic responses to systems change via Moral Imaginations, which is a methodology and community for ‚rigorous imagining for moral futures‘. As Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
My background is in police research (Ph.D. in sociology from Lund, Sweden). My current long-term project is to finish a series of co-authored books about how the metamodern perspective can redefine different aspects of society: politics, the study of history, economy, ethics, and law. I have formerly been engaged as a co-founder of the Initiative for Co-Development, a Swedish civic platform that creates platforms for transpartisan civic dialogues and deliberations. I’ve also been an initiator and organizer of the Metamodern Arts Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, and more recently have worked on mapping out all forms of governance in the world, and been researching the future of education and how it must be redefined for the Internet Age. Currently, I’m thethe moderator and host of the Metamodernism Forum, which gathers thinkers and activists from around the world.
This intention drives Politics for Tomorrow, a non-partisan initiative that I’m directing since 2015. In our work with political-administrative institutions from the local to the highest federal level in Germany and internationally, we promote transformative and participatory design approaches for a world that values well-being of people and planet beyond GDP.
Trained in Design (BDes) and Public Policy (MPP), I strategize and facilitate co-creation processes to address public challenges for several years. It’s a pleasure to share that knowledge and collectively work on responsible innovation standards for all public administrations – e.g. during the Academy at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, with our handbook on „Public Design“ or in other civil learning spaces.
As a scientist, as an activist as well as an entrepreneur, I have dedicated myself since the early 1990s to the (re)generation and strengthening of the material and immaterial life foundations of humanity. In particular, the ecological and economic interactivities within the biogeosphere and the anthroposphere and their cultures and realizations in politics, society and economy are at the core of my endeavors.
Currently, I work for the World Future Council as Spokesperson Ecosystem Restoration and I support the Friday4Future movement as co-founding member and advisory board member of Scientists for Future. In the Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler VDW (Federation of German Scientists), I have been an advisory board member for many years and I am active as a member of the German Association Club of Rome, too. I also serve on the advisory board of the Hamburg Climate Week and chair the expert jury of INTERNORGA for HMC Hamburg Messe u. Congress, and am an Ambassador for the Economy for the Common Good. On the other hand, I earn my living through the United Sustainability Group, founded by me, which aims at the establishment of a regenerative, life-sustaining economy and on strategic impact investments, specifically for the development of infrastructural and natural livelihoods. Before, I was Vice-Director at the Zeppelin University, Senior Fellow at the IASS Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Research Fellow of the Darwin Initiative of Royal Society of Science at the Natural History Museum in London, Research Director at University Hohenheim, Research Leader at Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy, and produced over 60 scientific publications.
JASCHA ROHR
ROMAN HUBER
KARDE WIRTZ
DANIELA BECKER
HANS SAUER STIFTUNG
TOMAS BJÖRKMAN
NIKOLAUS ROHR
DOROTHEE APFELD
HERMANN ARNOLD
HEINZ KAISER
ANNA SCHÄTZL
INSTITUT FÜR PARTIZIPATIVES GESTALTEN
The Cocreation Foundation is a recognized non-profit foundation under public law in accordance with §80 of the German Civil Code in conjunction with § 2 paragraph 1 of the Berlin Foundation Law. The responsible supervisory authority is the Senate Department for Justice, Consumer Protection and Anti-Discrimination of the State of Berlin.
Director: Jascha Rohr
Chairman of the Foundation Board: Michael Pachmajer
