“The most important things in life cannot be strategized.
They have to be lived.”
- Nicole Bastien -
Who I am
I grew up watching a country collapse in real time. That experience stayed with me. Not as trauma but as knowledge that is best translated as a fine sense of how systems change. Over time, I developed a very deep understanding of what moves beneath the surface before anyone names it. Of what people do when the ground disappears and how systems react when they are in crisis.
I have been a social worker, a lobbyist, a CEO, and a serial entrepreneur. I have sat in fancy boardrooms with investors, advised governments, and co-created with underserved communities across continents.
I have built many things. Some good, some useless. I succeeded and failed countless times. I lost myself in things until I had the guts to turn my back on what no longer made sense. Those were the moments when I found my own way. Actually, when I found myself.
This is not a shero story. It is called life.
All of it is with me when I enter a room.
My Work
Our wisdom ends where our blindness begins. That’s why I listen until I hear what you don’t see. That's where and when our real work begins.
I work with leaders, founders, business owners, investors, policymakers, and governments. Anyone standing at a threshold where the old answers have stopped working but what comes next hasn't yet revealed itself. Those are usually the ugly moments of uncertainty.
My delivery isn't a plan. It's clarity and self-actualization. The kind of power that comes from finally seeing the pathway forward.
That happens across three spaces:
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Advisory & Consulting
Strategic & project-based work with organizations, governments, investors, and municipalities. Rigorous, grounded, and always connected to what's actually happening in real life.
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The Tea Room
Deep 1:1 work, all about you and what moves you. We go to the edges of what you're building or becoming, or seeking inspiration for. I am your thought partner. And when it's needed, I give you the advice that doesn't soften the truth.
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Speaking
On my favorites: humanity in the economy, community economy development, community capital, economies in transition, the forces that shape them, and what leadership looks like when the ground is shifting.
What I Stand for
Humanity in the economy. As a value statement and a design principle.
But first, an uncomfortable truth: the economy is not broken. Unfortunately, it is working exactly as designed. Built with specific intentions. Producing predictable consequences: climate breakdown, debt, social fracture, loneliness.
I stand for an economic paradigm in service of humanity. Because at its root, I see economy itself as a social practice. How a community manages its resources to secure its own survival. That is not a metaphor or a socio-romantic fantasy. That is the original definition. Older than markets, older than money, older than states.
So I am actively redesigning the economy from the ground up, where the lever is most powerful: community economy development. Right now in South Africa's townships and with some activities in Kenya.
Africa is not a charity case. It holds what much of the Western world has lost: dense networks and adaptivity. That’s why I founded the CO-LAB for Future Economics and What Matters, and that’s where both do their work. On the ground. With the people it concerns.
This work requires more than strategy. It requires the willingness to question what we have accepted as given. When it comes to transformation, most of us don’t fear to lose their freedom. They fear losing their privileges. And this can be very messy at times.
Where My Work Lives
The research and institutional backbone of my practice. Generating economic theory from fieldwork and returning it to practice.
The proof of concept. Community economy development, active in South Africa, Kenya, and Germany.
Reflections
on what moves me
Get in Touch
