My personal journey started in Central Europe, where I grew up in Vienna, a melting pot of humans, where Eastern, Southern and Western Europeans have connected for centuries.
I grew up in an abundant country, yet a society just a generation apart from the Holocaust with many questions silenced and unanswered, patterns repeating. The guiding questions of my life became: What would I have done? Who do I choose to be?
As a teenager I started founding entrepreneurial projects that fostered a mindset of diversity and inclusion, such as an elementary school paper that gave children a voice.
As a sophomore in high school I spent a term in Midwest USA as a foreign exchange student. I found myself living with a racist and conservative family, while assigned to a school in district, where I was one of the few white kids.
Navigating these two worlds as a teenager, trying to make sense of my own identity as a foreigner in the midst of it all, changed my life and made me decide to invest myself into creating a more inclusive and interconnected world. Back home I co-founded a student association, IG Wien, that finances students from multitude of backgrounds to bring diversity of minds and action to Europe's economic and policy symposium European Forum Alpbach and went on to build social businesses and communities in Europe, US and New Zealand, learning to be a more effective and meaningful changemaker with each experience.
I work in ways that center feminist, non-binary and life-affirming practices. My coaching is grounded in an intersectional worldview.
* All Cats Are Beautiful
In New Zealand, experiencing Maōri leadership and partnership, I began to understand how business and organizational practices change when they are rooted in indigenous ways.
Through co-founding a Black reparations-inspired movement, I witnessed the life-giving and transformative possibilities that arise when a project is governed by Black love and care.
I firmly believe that systems changing leadership begins within: individually, then in the way we build relationships and weave community and collectives.
Weaving my experiences together, I began developing learning experiences and a coaching approach that bridges leadership development with conversations about social justice and inequality, in order to help build structures for true inclusion and belonging.
My professional journey
An activist-entrepreneur, I was part of co-creating the early days of Social Entrepreneurship in my country through Vienna's Impact Hub and Ashoka in 2010 and have since been involved in innovation communities around the world, including the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship in New Zealand.
In 2011, I co-founded one of Austria's early social businesses, Three Coins, which develops playful solutions for Financial Literacy. In 2020, I committed myself to co-birthing the inter-racial financial relationship building movement BuyBackBlackDebt in the US.
With my skill for community weaving, I love to bring groups and projects to life that focus on shifting power dynamics in our dominant systems, most recently through the emergent Uncertain Futures Institute.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, my academic work focused on the Human Rights Aspects of Sex Work in Europe and how the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers could be rendered effective through local Social Entrepreneurs.
People who hire me as a coach typically look for someone who holds a multitude of perspectives, significant personal experience in social justice, the world of entrepreneurship and systems change, and methods that go beyond the tried and true.
I am certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), graduate of MBI’s Wayfinder Life Coach Training and am in ongoing mentorship and supervision by senior coaches in Europe and the US.