Micheline Ntiru is an impact leader with over 20 years of professional experience across Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States. She has held leadership positions with multinationals and leading NGOs such as Nokia and Care International respectively, as well as with startups and academia. Fluent in nine languages—including Swahili, French,…
Michael Kass (Founder, Story & Spirit) is an international facilitator, consultant, and healer who works with organizations and individuals to bring humanity, resilience, and the Sacred back to leadership and change work. Witnessing the power of story, deep presence, and a simple breath to facilitate transformation, he has developed a unique approach that brings together…
Micah Frumkin is a Senior-level monitoring, evaluation, research, learning, and adaptation (MERLA) expert in the field of international development. He has more than seventeen years of experience supporting U.S. government agencies, multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic organizations, and implementing partners in designing, maintaining, and improving MERLA approaches at policy, portfolio, and activity levels. His experience includes…
Kara Bender (she/her) is a systems thinker, organizer, participant-centered educator, and a skillful and playful facilitator. Through her consulting organization, Seed & Spiral, she encourages growing our collective imaginations for liberation through body-based, earth-centered, equity offerings. Kara specializes in team building and takes an experiential approach to all of her facilitation in order to foster…
Henrique Vedana has close to 20 years of experience in organizations and as a consultant for sustainable development, change process, strategy and innovation, multi-stakeholder dialogue design and facilitation, learning and creative processes. His facilitation experience in the past 12 years ranges from designing and supporting large-scale civil society conferences to small gatherings mixing business, academia,…
Mwasilwa Ambali is a bilingual agricultural engineer with over 12 years of experience facilitating projects and workshops across Africa and internationally. He has collaborated with international research institutes, private sector companies, and development agencies to drive innovation and sustainable practices in agriculture. Mwasilwa’s expertise lies in agricultural research, project management, and market intelligence, and he…
Regina Solares began facilitating trainings in 2014, from the position she held in one of the largest telecommunications companies in Guatemala. In 2016 she physically experienced the impact of stress in her life, which led her after ten years in the corporate world to seek balance again. Today Regina facilitates innovative and disruptive programs that…
Birgit Hermann is a social impact professional who has navigated international landscapes, leading organizations and teams through complex challenges and transformations. She is a senior leader and former country director with over 20 years of experience spanning 20+ countries, bringing a unique blend of strategic insight, cultural fluency, and leadership acumen to every endeavor. Since…
Jake Wild Crea brings conflict management practices from the peacebuilding field to improve how organizations do good in the world. He is an independent conflict resolution practitioner with local, national, and international experience. Fueled by the belief that conflict is inherent to change, Jake helps organizations and individuals lean into productive conflict and address barriers…
Guayana Páez-Acosta is a sustainability and wellbeing professional, entrepreneur, facilitator, yogini, student and teacher. With more than 20 years of experience in the field of sustainability, she has worked in Latin America and the United States with academic, philanthropic and civil society organizations, businesses, and multisector alliances. Guayana earned a master’s degree in Environment 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—creates 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’s expertise in business process management has been shaped by her diverse professional journey. Starting as a customer care representative while still in college, she steadily progressed.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in business management from Central Philippine University, Leigh transitioned into roles with increasing responsibility. She began as a virtual assistant for US professionals, where she efficiently supported top-tier management with various tasks including managing company materials, workflows, training, and finance.
Leigh’s career path led her to management roles overseeing teams across industries like real estate, medical, construction, and cleaning. Her hands-on experience in these sectors provided her with a solid understanding of business operations and management practices.
Additionally, Leigh demonstrated her skills in sales and marketing as a successful sales executive, closing service deals. Her role as an events support generalist at a KPO company further broadened her skill set, contributing to delivering services to clients worldwide.
Leigh’s diverse background and proactive approach make her an asset in optimizing business processes and driving success.
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.
