The Amani Institute

Rajiv was formerly a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where he was responsible for the leadership development of McKinsey’s 1,500 Partners globally. In this role, Rajiv led multiple learning program redesign efforts and was one of the highest rated program faculty in McKinsey, having worked personally with hundreds of consultants on helping them develop their problem solving and relationship building skills. Rajiv is now a Partner at THNK, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership and a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where he lectures on various leadership topics. With an international upbringing – Indian parents, born in the UK, brought up in Zambia and having lived and worked in Ghana, Switzerland and now, The Netherlands – Rajiv’s mission is to enable global leaders to fully unlock their leadership potential.

Dr. Marshall Ganz entered Harvard College in 1960. In 1964, a year before graduating, he left to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing. During the 1980s, he worked to develop effective organizing programs for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, he returned to Harvard College and, after a 28-year "leave of absence," completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He received an MPA from the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his Ph.D in sociology in 2000. Today, he is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where he teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He is also credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.

Andreas Heinecke, founder and CEO of Dialogue Social Enterprise GmbH, started his path as social entrepreneur in 1988. While working for a radio-station, he was charged with developing a rehabilitation program for a blind colleague. Inspired by this encounter, he created the concept of Dialogue in the Dark. Since then, millions of visitors and participants have taken part in Dialogue in the Dark exhibitions and business workshops worldwide, thereby promoting empathy and tolerance towards “otherness” in the greater public understanding. In 1997 Dialogue in Silence was created as complimentary experience in total silence where participants discover a repertoire of non-verbal expression with the help of deaf and hearing impaired guides and trainers. In 2005 Andreas became the first "Ashoka-Fellow" in Europe and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship appointed him as “Outstanding Global Social Entrepreneur”. Since 2011 Andreas holds a Professorship at the Danone Chair for Social Business at the European Business School in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Anya Kamenetz is a senior writer at Fast Company Magazine and the author of several books and book chapters about the future of education. In 2011, Learning, Freedom and the Web (http://learningfreedomandtheweb.org/) and The Edupunks’ Guide (edupunksguide.org) were published as free ebooks by the Mozilla and Gates Foundation respectively. Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006), dealt with youth economics and politics; DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, (Chelsea Green, 2010) investigated innovations to address the crises in cost, access, and quality in higher education. She was named a 2010 Game Changer in Education by the Huffington Post, received 2009 and 2010 National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing by the Village Voice in 2005.

Nick is the Co-founder and President of TechChange, a social enterprise that provides scalable and interactive technology training for social change. Previously, he founded DCPEACE and PeaceRooms, two innovative digital media and conflict transformation programs for elementary school students and teachers. Nick is an educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with significant international peacebuilding and development expertise. He is an adjunct faculty member at American University, George Mason University, George Washington University and the United Nations University for Peace (UPEACE).

Menno van Dijk is co-founder and MD of THNK, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership, which offers an international executive program for social entrepreneurs, commercial entrepreneurs and innovation managers focused on developing creative solutions to large societal challenges. Before that, he worked for 22 years as a Consultant, Partner and Director at McKinsey & Company, with a focus on innovation and growth. Menno has worked and lived in the Netherlands, Australia and South Africa and also has led projects in most European countries, the US, China and India. He built McKinsey’s first business, called NM Incite, in a JV with Nielsen. Menno has been active in several social ventures and initiatives, mostly in the area of social media, social entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. Menno received his MSc from the State University of Leiden in the Netherlands and his MBA from INSEAD, France.

Dr. Craig Zelizer founded the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, a leading networking website with over 7500 professionals, academics, and students interested and working on issues of international development and conflict. He is currently the Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution MA Program at Georgetown University. His areas of expertise include working with youth from violent conflict regions, civil society development and capacity building in transitional societies, program evaluation and design, working on conflict sensitivity and mainstreaming across development sectors, the connection between trauma and conflict, the role of the private sector in peacebuilding, and arts and peacebuilding. To date he has worked in over 14 countries, helped train hundreds of individuals in conflict resolution processes and facilitated several long-term dialogue processes. Mr. Zelizer received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, M.A. from the Central European University and Ph.D. from George Mason University.