Tsegga Medhin (USA) is a humanitarian, an executive coach and an equity accelarator. She is an activist in the business of building a better world by advocating for social impact. With over 20 years of corporate leadership experience with Wells Fargo, IBM, and Credit Suisse, Tsegga is a speaker and a certified executive coach to affect individuals and organizations on leadership that is not only technical but adaptive, not only transactional but transformational. Tsegga Medhin is the President of UN WOMEN USA NC.
Mohamed Gabris (Lebanon) brings 7 years of experience in the humanitarian-gender-protection nexus while responding to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. His expertise includes programme quality assurance, mainstreaming gender, accountability, and different protection-related aspects; working with various NGOs and INGOs in Lebanon such as Action Against Hunger, the Norwegian Refugee Council and recently the ABAAD - Gender Resource Center. Since 2013, Mohamed has been working in the domains of personal and community development with Initiatives of Change.
Fadi George’s main vocation is to build bridges of peace among different groups and worlds. Fadi is interested in arts, peace, justice, and safe spaces. His Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership from Seattle University inspired him to work on the training of young leaders in Egypt who are interested in building a just and peaceful society. His long-term vision is to create safe spaces that allow a journey of authentic transformation within our organizations, societies and the world.
Yvonne Buchheim (Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who returned to Germany in 2019 after twenty years abroad. Her art explores the body as a home, a concept challenged by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness. Using biographical narrative and stop-motion film, she reflects on illness and healing intersecting with a pandemic. The resulting artworks are intimate testimonies of fragility and resistance, they visualise the paradoxical, absurd, and existential in life.
Olena Kashkarova is a Ukrainian mediator, facilitator, and trainer on non-violent communication. She has been based in Berlin, Germany, since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in spring 2022. Having worked in the area of peace-building in different capacities for over a decade, she is now a Ukrainian activist, supporting hospitals in Ukraine and Ukrainian defenders with life-saving supplies.
Sarah Schofield is Canadian and once more part of the Creative Leadership family this year. With a background in photo-journalism, she has enjoyed helping to tell the stories of others through her writing and photography. Currently returning to school to pursue her love of helping others through a nursing career, she hopes to be a positive influence to those she meets along her journey.
Dara Sabry currently works as an English teacher at an international school in Egypt. Dara was first introduced to Initiatives of Change in 2016 and found the experience an integral moment in her life. During her summer internship she met multiple individuals from all around the world. Together they shared their stories, listened to each other and bonded over similar (as well as different) experiences which caused the group to grow into an international family.
Mahek Ramchandani is a Psychotherapist based in Pune, India. Her practice for the past 2 years has brought her closer to understanding human behaviour and the mind. She is also a certified yoga instructor and a meditation practitioner who works towards holistic well-being. Before beginning her professional journey she has volunteered with various rehabilitation centrers and clinics in Pune. This gave her a lens to observe and understand deep-rooted social and cultural issues. It also inculcated the love for art and self-work in her.
Among many other things, Professor Arpan Yagnik is an expert on creativity. So perhaps it is no surprise that he signed up for the Creative Leadership 2021 conference, which was part of last summer’s Caux Forum. Little did he know that he would find himself helping to run one of the IofC Hubs, an online forum for people active with Initiatives of Change in different parts of the world.
Arpan, who is Associate Professor of Advertising at Penn State University in the US, first encountered IofC in 2005 in his country of birth, India. Two of his cousins invited him to join them at a youth conference at Asia Plateau, the Initiatives of Change centre in the mountains of Maharashtra. ‘I thought it was going to be a mountaineering camp,’ he says. ‘I did end up climbing mountains, but they were of a very different nature.’
I did end up climbing mountains, but they were of a very different nature.
Climbing internal mountains – and enabling others to do so – is what interests Arpan. What he learnt at Asia Plateau chimed in with his upbringing. ‘The practice of inner listening and living by high moral values was not a huge shift, but it deepened my foundations,’ he says. ‘I stay very strictly to those basics. I know I have to answer to my conscience.’
Since then, Arpan – whose great-uncle, Bharat Dixit, has had a long connection with IofC – has been involved with IofC’s Let’s Make A Difference (LMAD) programme in India. But he had had no contact with the IofC conference centre at Caux until he joined Creative Leadership online, and still hasn’t been there in person.
Arpan speaking at Let's make a Difference in India
At the time of the Creative Leadership conference, Arpan was completing a chapter on ‘creativity and leadership’ for a book on creative intelligence. ‘I felt this conference might provide me with something that I had missed. So I cleared my week. I didn’t go in as someone who has written and given a TEDx talk on creativity, and this enabled me to learn and collaborate openly and humbly.’
Arpan found the experience ‘beautiful’. ‘The sessions were finely curated and the speakers aptly selected. I picked up on the cheerfulness and hope of the young participants and organizers’
He decided he had a contribution to make to IofC’s global network and, after taking part in a number of meetings in 2021, offered his skills to this year’s Hub, which is focusing on building trust between IofC’s different generations. 'I am not one to sit on the sidelines,’ he says. ‘If I see a problem or an issue, I act to fix it. I am a charged electron ready to jump into new orbits, and the Creative Leadership conference made me even more charged.’
Arpan’s latest book is on fear. ‘There is no liberation when there is fear,’ he says. ‘If you can defeat fear in the moment, then your decisions won’t be dictated by it.’
One key, he says, is to have faith in yourself and your abilities. ‘If a problem has been presented to you, it’s because you have the innate ability to solve it.’
In India
For instance, when he arrived at Penn State University in 2015, he wanted to teach creativity, but no such course existed. ‘Penn State is a mammoth organization. Things take so much time to get approval. I was afraid. I was new to the system. I didn’t have tenure. But I kept telling myself, you had this thought and you cannot let it go. This came to you because you can manage it.’ The course has now been running for three years.
Frank Buchman
It was at Penn State – then Penn State College – over 100 years ago that Frank Buchman developed and tested the ideas and practices which became Initiatives of Change.
‘Penn State is where it all started,’ says Arpan. ‘But now Frank Buchman and his legacy live in the library, and not in people’s daily lives. I want to revive that.’
The possibilities are endless, he says, among them an IofC centre at the university and a club where students could meet for quiet times. It’s important, he believes, to set up institutional mechanisms, so continuation does not depend on his, or anyone else’s, presence.
Before moving to academia in 2015, Arpan worked with Sony in India. ‘I left the corporate world because I value time more than money,’ he says. ‘I moved into an area of work where I would have time for what matters to me. I protect my time vigorously, so that I can give it generously.’
He encourages people not to hold back from walking the path they believe they have been called to. ‘It’s not that everybody will be there for you – if that happens, it’s a bonus. Many times people try to take an initiative and they hope that an organization will stand behind them, providing funds, manpower, resources. If that doesn’t happen, they take it personally and move away.
‘That expectation-driven thing is not the way. You have decided that the change begins with you, so whether someone is there with you or not should not matter. If I am given that thought in my time of silence and contemplation, I am going to do it.’
If a problem has been presented to you, it’s because you have the innate ability to solve it.
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