Hello, I’m Tatiana Glad. Bob has been a colleague, friend, sparring partner and mentor through many stages of my learning over the past 15 years. I met him while participating in a Berkana Institute retreat through the From the Four Directions initiative, which led to an invitation to be part of the design and hosting team for a Learning Village at Castle Borl. We worked together as I served on the Pioneers of Change cultivation unit, and journeyed in learning through these networks with an incredible exploration into social change and sustainable community-building including a Berkana learning journey to Oaxaca, Mexico and stewarding of the Art of Hosting practice. My travels have led me to Amsterdam where I co-founded Impact Hub Amsterdam.
I have always been passionate about how we create a better world – one in which people are in healthy relationship with each other and with our planet. Born to Dutch and Croatian parents and raised in Belgium and Canada, I studied international business and entrepreneurship because I believed business could be a vehicle for social change. My passion and values were united with a belief in collaborative action in my student years where I became active in AIESEC and brokered international exchange opportunities for hundreds of young graduates. I have worked, lived and learned in the world in numerous places in Asia, Latin America and Europe. And as I learned more about the world, it made less sense…so I pursued an action research MSc in Responsible Business Practice at the University of Bath (predecessor to Ashridge’s current MSc) to deepen my understanding of systems change and the paradigm challenge at hand. I turned my work within a major financial institution into a thesis inquiring into the experience of a social change agent in a multinational, asking myself: what conditions enable – and disable – changemakers within organisations? I left the organisation seeking to learn more about the economic aspect of enabling social change and spent some time diving into the work of microfinance in Bangladesh and the field of social investment in Europe.
Along the way, I co-founded Waterlution with a dear friend who shared my love for water – and my understanding of water as a powerful storyteller for systems change and community cohesion. We have hosted a generation of water-loving changemakers across sectors and two Water Innovation Labs in Canada, as well as capacity-building sessions drawing on the Art of Hosting.
My work has evolved through work in multi-stakeholder processes on sustainability challenges ranging from mobility, energy, housing, urban development and water. I have travelled into all sectors, seeking their edges of transformation and coming to understand that my talent lies in the space between – bringing diverse people into collaborative learning about what they care about. My playground for much of the past 10 years has been with my mates Arjen Bos and Peter Merry in Engage! InterAct, a community of practice for life-affirming leadership and entrepreneurship. I currently am active most of my time in the Impact Hub network, nurturing an impact ecosystem.
Find me at Impact Hub Amsterdam and on Twitter @tdglad