Scaling Deep

SUBSCRIBE [https://tatianafraser.substack.com/] to Tatiana's Sanctuary Newsletter: https://tatianafraser.substack.com/ --- The first woman elected mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante [https://projetmontreal.org/valerie-plante] has distinguished herself through her leadership, attentive listening and closeness to the Montreal population. It is with a progressive, ambitious and innovative vision that she has been able to rally Montrealers from all four corners of the city. Both warm and rigorous, she works with her team to make Montreal a city at the forefront. Her career outside the political arena is one of her strengths. After completing studies in anthropology, museology and multi-ethnic intervention, Valérie Plante developed extensive field experience within several community organizations, including the Fondation Filles d'action. These experiences taught her a great deal about the various issues affecting the metropolis. Following these apprenticeships, Valérie Plante made the leap into municipal politics in 2013. First elected as a councillor for the Sainte-Marie district, she stood out for her audacity and became head of Projet Montréal in 2016. It only took her one year to be elected mayor of Montreal. After four years as mayor of Montreal and the borough of Ville-Marie, the people of Montreal reaffirmed their confidence in her by giving her a second term in the 2021 elections.

Vicki Saunders [https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsaunders/] is an entrepreneur, award-winning mentor, advisor to the next generation of change-makers and leading advocate for entrepreneurship as a way of creating positive transformation in the world. Vicki is Founder of #radical generosity and Coralus [https://www.linkedin.com/company/coralusworld/] (formerly SheEO), a global community of radically generous women supporting women-led Ventures working on the World’s To-Do List. Vicki has co-founded and run ventures in Europe, Toronto and Silicon Valley and taken a company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Vicki was received numerous awards for her work at Coralus including; UBS Global Visionary in 2020, YWCA Women of Distinction Award in 2020, Business Leader of the Year 2019 by the Toronto Regional Board of Trade, 2018 Startup Canada Entrepreneurship Promotion Award and was selected as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2001. - Scaling Deep: The Coralus Case Study [https://systemsanctuary.com/coralus-case-study-scale-deep-1]

zohra moosa is a facilitator, coach, trainer and advisor to individuals, groups, organisations and funders engaged in the non-profit and for purpose sector. Her aim is to accompany movement actors to change how we make change. In particular, she specialises in supporting feminist, queer and anti-racist approaches to thrive in contexts where there is a will but not yet clarity about the way. As a coach, she focuses on supporting BIPOC femmes in leadership positions to recognise and release the toll that working in predominantly white spaces takes, regather purpose and vision, and generate options, so they may act with renewed energy. In addition to her current activism and contract work, she serves on the boards of climate justice group Fossil Free Netherlands and Transnational Institute (TNI), an international research and advocacy organisation. She has been engaged in multiple social movements over the last three decades, including feminist, anti-racist, 2SLGBTQIA+, and environmental justice movements. She has done so as an academic, as an activist and as a professional/practitioner, working at local, national, regional and international levels. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, zohra worked as the Executive Director of Mama Cash, the first and oldest international women’s/feminist fund in the world. Now living in Amsterdam, zohra has also lived in London and Toronto. You can read more about zohra’s work here and here. Join our Systems Sanctuary newsletter! [https://systemsanctuary.com/keepintheloop]

Terrellyn Fearn is a Mi’kmaq scholar-practitioner, Snake clan from Glooscap First Nation and a citizen of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Terrellyn is the Project Director of Turtle Island Institute [https://turtleislandinstitute.ca/], a global Indigenous social innovation think and do tank (a learning lodge) grounded in Metuaptmumk: All Around Seeing, a uniquely Indigenous approach to wholistic human development and systems transformation.  Her work spans 30 years exploring the human dimensions of transformative change where systems science, arts and the sacred meet by amplifying Indigenous languages, ancient wisdom traditions and Ancestral sciences. She is a Research Associate with the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation & Resilience and holds a Masters degree in Education. She has worked with over 380 Indigenous communities across Turtle Island (North America) to advance wellbeing and create communities of practice dedicated to social change and heart centred leadership. Terrellyn is a mother and believes large-scale systemic change begins through restoring the sacred feminine and reawakening the human Spirit by connecting to self, each other, our Earth Mother and all of Creation.

Bayo Akomolafe [https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/] is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope. Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family emigrated to Bonn, Germany with his father on his first diplomatic assignment. This - Bayo’s first trip - would foreshadow a life of travel (both literally and figuratively) to come. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication in Kinshasa, Zaire, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”