Core Team Coordinator

Kat was educated in Environmental Science and dedicated the first part of her career to environmental restoration and sustainability initiatives. Recognising the limitations of science in the current system, she transitioned to facilitation of shared decision-making around the natural environment, motivated by the building of social capital realised through these processes. Away from DAF, Kat runs a small community interest company that delivers projects in ecological restoration and the reconnection of communities with their natural environment. After joining DAF early in 2019, she quickly became an active volunteer and is involved in many DAF circles and groups. In Kat’s own words, she ‘came home’ when she found the Deep Adaption Forum. Having experienced the gift of this international community, Kat is deeply committed to supporting its development and evolution to ensure it remains available and relevant for others seeking a soft place to land as they wake up to our predicament. 

Senior Facilitator

An independent trainer, facilitator and ‘host’ of collaborative learning processes, Katie has over 15-years of experience in formal and informal/community education. Katie is a skillful facilitator of ‘un-learning’, that is, creating spaces in which it is possible to connect with ways of knowing that are broader and richer than the cognitive/evaluative paradigm. If Deep Adaptation requires responses that are effective in reducing harm, then it is essential to build awareness and bring into consciousness all of the ways that stories of separation, scarcity and addiction to progress can be manifest in our ways of relating with self and others, and create new ways of being that are characterised by love, respect, inclusivity and connection. Before joining the DAF team, Katie was the Director of a UK sustainability education charity for six years, and project manager of several European sustainability projects in the fields of formal and community education. She also has expertise in participatory and alternative evaluation approaches (measuring what’s valuable, rather than valuing what’s measurable). She has an MA in Sustainable Leadership Development, and is trained in a variety of dialogic learning methods (including circling, authentic relating, ‘philosophy for children’, and non-violent communication). In addition to Katie’s facilitation roles in DAF, she is also secretary to the Holding Group and promotes the development of communities of practice in line with DAF principles and values.

Professions’ Network Curator

Dorian curates the DAF Professionals’ Network (on Ning) on a day-to-day basis; liaises with Interest Group and Task Group leaders, including managing the process of launching either; carries out quickly-applicable research on how to design better collaborative work processes; and oversees capacity-building activities for Task Groups. Through his work and PhD research, Dorian intends to help develop the Deep Adaptation Forum into the foundation of an international mass movement, focusing on peaceful responses to the climate and ecological crises we face – and the collapses that are likely to unfold. Simultaneously, he wants to develop his skills in the field of self-organised group facilitation and contribute to scholarship on the role of mutual and social learning within such processes.

Platforms Assistant

Zori has a business education, with an MSc from Warwick University. Upon graduation, she co-founded a small innovation consulting company and soon after moved into IT entrepreneurship and management, where she spent the majority of her career. She left that world in 2017 to look for a calling that was closer to her heart. Upon her first encounter with Jem Bendell and our predicament, she realised that her sense of aliveness and meaning lies in her gift and love for connection. As a consequence, she oriented her life towards creating spaces of connection with self, other and nature that bring out the most beautiful sides of our humanness. In the last 2 years, she has built a coaching business, created the Connection Playground initiative and facilitated numerous groupwork spaces, including regular Deep Adaptation gatherings online. She joined the Deep Adaptation Forum in July 2019 to support the team of volunteers moderating the Deep Adaptation Facebook group. She’s also the project leader of the Deep Adaptation Groups Network, providing a space for cross-pollination and peer support between DA groups in different locations, languages and topics.

Communications Coodinator

Heather is a Colombian-USer and spent 17 years in England before moving to Colombia. Her background includes being an economics lecturer, an interfaith minister of spiritual counseling, founder of a refugee and asylum seeker organisation, project coordinator for Education for Sustainable Deveopment in UK universities, a hospice volunteer, founder of a Transition Town, trainer for Extinction Rebellion International and UK, and volunteer coordinator for an AIDS organisation. She considers herself a communitarian-anarchist, having seen that governments are not responding appropriately to the unfolding crises over the centuries. Her favourite quotation is from Mark Vonnegut: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” Heather is responsible for the website, blog, internal bulletins, and a communications strategy for DAF. She’s very approachable.

Fundraising Coordinator

Tom is a husband and father; a resident of Brooklyn, NYC; equally as happy on his bicycle, especially on temperate days, as at home in bed with a book. He has lived in a few different U.S. states and has had two stints abroad. He once turned down a position in Mali and ended up in Oklahoma instead, but the relationship that caused this rerouting was worth it and continues to this day. He has helped raise funding for half a dozen non-profit organisations, the longest of which was the International Rescue Committee, and issues of migration and borders, politics and human decency, interest and worry him. The start of the school climate strike movement inspired a sense that a far larger contingent of people of all ages cared about how the planet was being treated. Interacting with communities of like-minded activists, especially those pondering internal, interpersonal, and practical adaptations to our predicament, has been a deeply gratifying outcome.