Visiting Fellows and Executives in Residence

Alona Revko is an Academic Visitor within a program funded by the British Academy. Her current research focuses on stakeholder relationships and the development of social entrepreneurship ecosystems. Alona is also a professor at Chernihiv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine. She has over 10 years of experience teaching various courses for Ukrainian master students, including Social Entrepreneurship, Project Management, Leadership and Administration, and Sustainable Development of Society. Alona has international experience in social entrepreneurship and sustainable development, participating in study visits and scientific internships in different European countries including Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Georgia. The outcomes of her research are reflected in more than 80 publications.

Economist by training, network weaver and ecosystem catalyst by vocation, and optimist by choice. Driven by hope and optimism for creating social and environmental innovations that improve the lives of those most in need.

Célia served as a member of the Executive Committee at Instituto Beja (2024–2025), an organization that seeks to catalyze the philanthropy ecosystem, working in knowledge, advocacy, and labs. She was also Director of the Center for Exponential Change (CMe), the Brazilian hub of the C4EC – Center for Exponential Change.

From 2012 to 2024, Célia was Executive Director of the Instituto de Cidadania Empresarial (ICE), working on impact investing and social business. Before that, she served as Director of Ashoka Canada, Managing Director of the Ashoka Global Fellowship, and Director of Ashoka in Brazil and Paraguay (2002–2011).

Earlier in her career, she worked with IDIS as Program Coordinator, supporting the creation of new community foundations (2000–2002). She also founded the fundraising consulting firm Philanthropics (1994–2013), co-founded the Brazilian Association of Fundraisers, and served as Fundraising Coordinator at Fundação Getulio Vargas (EAESP/FGV) until 2000.

Célia holds a Master’s degree in Economics from EAESP/FGV, with one year at ESSEC (France, 1990) and York University (Canada, 1993). She earned her undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of São Paulo (FEA/USP).
 

Char is inspired by people in business who use their power as a force for good and firmly believes that accountants will save the world. She is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Volans, Heliotropy and B Lab UK. More recently, in 2022 Char joined Natura &Co, the world’s biggest B Corp, as the Global Director of Advocacy where she is focused on supporting the business take a stand on key issues, and deepening relationships with partners who share a commitment to engaging in system level change. As a part of this role with the Skoll Centre, she designed the popular MBA course ‘The Regenerative and Circular Economy: How to Do Business in a Climate Emergency’, and the executive course ‘The Oxford Climate Emergency Programme’.  

Animated by the power of connection, Claire cultivates networks, partnerships, and collaborations to drive social progress. She collaborates with Oxford researchers and students to explore collective leadership themes and models. Currently the Director of Global Alliances at Skoll Foundation, Claire has led multi-year global network cultivation efforts and a portfolio of regional and global partnerships. She co-founded multiple global initiatives to increase access and inclusion, including the Skoll World Forum Fellowship, TEDx Global Impact Network, and TEDx Skoll Conversations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Claire advises and partners with organizations including Wasan Network, The Wellbeing Project, TED, and IRIS: International Resource for Impact and Storytelling. 

Cynthia Rayner works with social purpose organizations and funders as a researcher and co-learner. She is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, studying collective agency in pursuit of systems change. Her research focuses on how organizations and communities work to shape social systems in collective ways. Cynthia's passion is finding "stories from the edge" that reveal the power of people in collectives. She recently co-authored a book, "The Systems Work of Social Change". Cynthia is affiliated with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation as an adjunct lecturer & senior researcher. She is also the "Systems Storytelling Initiative Lead" at the Collective Change Lab and an active member of Catalyst 2030, a global network of social entrepreneurs.  

Esther Benjamin has been a global leader in business, government, and non-profit organizations for nearly 30 years, working in over 100 countries. She is currently CEO and Executive Director of World Education Services, based in New York, and serves on the Board of Directors of Echoing Green, B Lab Global, and Candid, among others. Iin 2021, she received the Fulbright Award for Global Leadership from One to World. Prior to this, she worked with Laureate Education, Inc. as CEO for Africa Operations and CEO of Monash South Africa in Johannesburg. She was then Laureate’s SVP for Global Public Affairs. Esther also served in President Obama’s Administration as Peace Corps Associate Director for Global Operations.  

Gayle is co-founder and CEO of pfc social impact advisors, an international consultancy offering strategic guidance in leadership development, programme strategy, and impact measures to leading foundations, corporations, impact investors, governments, and intermediaries. She also directs the Oxford Impact Investing Programme and the Social Finance Programme at Saïd Business School. Gayle has two decades of experience as a strategist, philanthropist, and trusted advisor to social investors worldwide. She has managed and assessed more than US$15 billion in philanthropic and social investments to alleviate poverty, mitigate climate change, promote gender and financial inclusion, and build the capacity of new leaders in the field of social finance. She has also advised social investors in more than 45 countries and has taught social investing classes worldwide. 

Jonathan's business, public policy, teaching, research, writing and not-for-profit work largely focuses on creating more environmentally, socially and economically resilient cities. Based in New York, Jonathan is the President of Jonathan Rose Companies, LLC and leads the firm’s vision, program and growth by developing award winning new projects, investment funds and city plans to model solutions which integrate the issues of affordable housing, community development, culture and the environment. Jonathan is also the Vice Chair of the Board of Enterprise Community Partners. Moreover, he and his wife Diana Rose are the co-founders of the Garrison Institute and he serves as Chair on its Board and leads its Pathways to Planetary Health Program.  

Martin is a consultant in organisation and leadership development, a facilitator of innovation and change; trainer, coach and author. He serves as Core-Faculty Member and Visiting Fellow of the Presencing Institute and is also a faculty member for the Global Alliance for Banking on Values and the Mastercard Executive Leadership Program. Previously, he served on the leadership programs of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, London Business School and the Copenhagen Business School. In the last 15 years, Martin has been facilitating leadership development and innovation programmes for senior executives in Africa, Europe, India, China, and the Middle East. Organisations he has consulted for include 3M, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Governance, HSBC, the World Bank, McKinsey & Company, the United Nations, and the Department for International Development of the British Government (DFID), among others.

As director of TEDxLondon, TEDxLondonWomen and before that TEDxEastEnd, Maryam has taken some of the world's most challenging, complex and important ideas and transformed them into high-impact stories for every kind of audience - from billionaire philanthropists to school kids in East London. Her mission is to bring life to ideas, give speakers the tools and confidence to present them brilliantly, and to create platforms that let the world hear them. In 2015 Maryam started X Equals to support individuals and teams bring life to their ideas through events design, curation, storytelling and pitch coaching. She currently works with several organisations focused on fighting climate change to help shape their strategy and communications towards major donors and has coached over 500 startups to pitch their ideas and business plans for investment. 

From 2002 to 2024, Melissa was the founding President and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc., an innovative non-profit whose mission is to accelerate philanthropy in pursuit of a just world. Melissa built RPA into one of the world’s leading philanthropic advisory, grant making, research and project management services, facilitating more than US$500 million per year across dozens of countries in all major issue areas. 

Under her leadership, RPA developed the “Philanthropy Roadmap” donor guides with support from the Gates Foundation. She created “The Theory of the Foundation” research program and wrote multiple reports in that initiative. An adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Business School, Melissa has also been appointed to the 2024-25 Visiting Faculty of Tsinghua University’s Schwarzman College and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. She is a board member of Candid, Equality Now, and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. In 2023, she was a Bellagio Center fellow. Melissa holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University

Tara helps build entrepreneurial ecosystems all over the world. From delivering fund-raising strategies to agricultural cooperatives in Angola to helping Arabian Gulf governments launch startup investment funds, she has dedicated most of her adult life to catalysing entrepreneurship, especially to growing enterprises in emerging markets and under-served communities in the U.S. Tara started her own company which trained over 2000 entrepreneurs across Africa and Latin America. Tara shifted her focus to impact investment and is now Director of Chemonics International, doing both strategy consulting and impact investing in Africa and the Middle East.

Darshan is the founder of social innovation studio, Super Being Labs. With 17 years of experience using design, creativity, and technology to help tackle complex social problems, he founded Super Being Labs to design a world that truly enables the best of human potential. Each project spans 1 or all 3 of these systems: systems for young people, systems for issues today, and systems for the arts. He is also the co-founder of Being ManKind, a project that uses storytelling to inspire boys to shun damaging gender stereotypes and grow into kind, compassionate and empathetic humans - everything that will render terms like 'Man Up' redundant. Outside of work, Darshan is a non-exec Chair at Sporting Memories Network - a social enterprise using sporting reminiscence to fight dementia and isolation for the elderly, Chair for STCA - a community charity in London.

Derrick Feldmann is recognized internationally as a leading researcher and advisor on social issues, movements and consumer public action. His insights are sought by organizations and media globally, and his work is regularly cited as a reliable source of data on today’s social issues. Feldmann has built an impressive body of research and insights into how and why the public takes action for change. He is the author of three books: "The Corporate Social Mind: How Companies Lead Social Change From the Inside Out", "Social Movements for Good: How Companies and Causes Create Viral Change" and "Cause for Change: The Why and How of Nonprofit Millennial Engagement". Feldmann currently splits his time between social issue research, the advisory firm ISG and the Ad Council Research Institute, where he oversees public research studies on pressing issues affecting Americans. 

François is the Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Head of Foundations at the World Economic Forum, including the Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers. Dr Bonnici is a public health physician, university professor, social change practitioner, foundation leader and author of ‘The Systems Work of Social Change’, awarded the Best Non-Profit Management Book of 2022. His career is rooted in front-line medical and humanitarian work, and he has worked extensively with the public sector, civil society, business and philanthropy to build progressive and catalytic partnerships. He is also a Rhodes Scholar, Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Fellow, and Academic Fellow at the University of Geneva, and was the Founding Director of the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town. 

James Stauch (MEDes) is a social innovation and systems change educator and consultant based in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada. He serves as co-chair of the Banff Systems Summit and as Complex Systems Strategist with ATCO’s SpaceLab. He was the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Community Prosperity at Mount Royal University, where he developed social innovation, leadership, and systems-focused learning programmes for undergraduate students and the wider community. James has also been a foundation executive and philanthropy consultant, which included designing and managing Arctic and Northern programmes with the Gordon Foundation.

Nick Andreou is the Head of Artificial Intelligence at Better Society Capital and the founder of Impact Edge Consulting, an advisory firm that helps early-stage investors and startups leverage impact as a source of competitive edge. He was previously an investment manager at Big Society Capital, Head of Insight and Impact at Balloon Ventures, and a researcher at the University of Nottingham. He holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and an MBA from Oxford’s Said Business School. A guest speaker at London Business School, Nick is also a founding member of ImpactVC, an initiative dedicated to helping VCs unlock their impact potential. 

Professor Rajiv S. Joshi is a regenerative economist, community organizer and entrepreneurial leader building global programs at the intersection of environmental, social, and economic justice. He directed the world’s largest Global South-led alliance to end poverty and is a steward to climate action initiatives around the world. He helped design the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and was the Principal Author of the Decisive Decade Inquiry into the Future of Climate Action. Rajiv has served as Associate Dean for Climate Action and chief impact officer at the Columbia Climate School, and is currently an adjunct Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) where he has developed the University’s first class in Climate Technology and Regenerative Entrepreneurship. Rajiv is currently Founder & CEO of Bridging Ventures, an agency driving radical collaboration, through content, partnerships and coalitions - to address systemic challenges across generations, sectors and geographies. 

From 2015 - 2022, Sean was the CEO of the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) and Director of the Economic Justice Program at the Open Society Foundations. Prior to this, he was a strategic investment advisor focusing on China, Mongolia, and Africa and the social and economic impact of large-scale extractive investments, working for Goldman Sachs (Asia) and the Rio Tinto group. He began his career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and worked for many years in film, television and newspapers. He is Chair of the Board of Directors of Oyu Tolgoi LLC, one of the largest known copper and gold deposits in the world and one of the most modern, safe and sustainable mining operations globally. 

Sophie Maclaren specialises in workplace wellbeing, mindfulness, and leadership development through interactive workshops, facilitated programmes, and executive coaching. Her work draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and leadership studies, combined with evidence-based mindfulness practices for impactful behaviour change with measurable outcomes for individuals and organisations. As well as designing mindfulness and leadership programmes at Saïd Business School, Sophie has worked with over 30 elite law-firms, banks, sports teams, universities, social enterprises, and professional service firms. She has also worked with the UK parliament on their Mindfulness Initiative think tank to support the Mindfulness All Party Parliamentary Group. 

Tara is a change leadership advisor, EMCC-accredited coach and social entrepreneur who strives to connect the dots between healthy people and healthy democracies, bringing consumer and citizen perspectives to conversations about culture change in health care and other complex systems. Over the past two decades she has convened and partnered with academic, cultural, scientific, and nonprofit institutions to lead strategic initiatives to advance public health, education, corporate social responsibility, and social change. Previously, Tara led Health Impact at the nonprofit Consumer Reports, where she developed strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of consumers. In 2017 she founded Civic Health Partners, an independent consulting practice working with purpose-driven organizations to develop trustworthy leadership and public engagement strategies. Tara speaks and writes about the future of health and the role of trust in achieving a more just and equitable health system. Her work on trust has appeared in JAMA, JMIR, BMJ Opinion, and the AMA Journal of Ethics podcast.  

Pip Wheaton is the Co-Founder of Climatics, a climate fund dedicated to supporting high-impact climate organisations across New Zealand. Pip works on climate change, both locally, where she now lives in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, and globally. Her work is informed by systems theory and a fierce sense of justice: her decision to work on climate stems from the recognition that it is a symptom of deep faults in our social, economic, and political systems.

She has worked in social entrepreneurship, local government, academia, and philanthropy across Australia, South Africa, the UK and Aotearoa. While in South Africa, she founded enke: Make Your Mark, a youth development organisation that has impacted tens of thousands of young people across the country. For this work, she was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2014.