Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on exploring the economic mindset needed to address the 21st century’s social and ecological challenges, and is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries.  She is a Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, where she teaches on the Masters in Environmental Change and Management. She is also a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.  Her internationally acclaimed idea of Doughnut Economics has been widely influential amongst sustainable development thinkers, progressive businesses and political activists, and she has presented it to audiences ranging from the UN General Assembly to the Occupy movement. Her book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist is being published in the UK and US in April 2017 and translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese.  Over the past 20 years, Kate’s career has taken her from working with micro-entrepreneurs in the villages of Zanzibar to co-authoring the Human Development Report for UNDP in New York, followed by a decade as Senior Researcher at Oxfam.

Rob Hopkins is co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and the Transition Network. He has many years’ experience in education, teaching permaculture and natural building, and set up the first 2-year full-time permaculture course in the world in Kinsale, Ireland, which was also the first community to develop an Energy Descent Action Plan. Futhermore, Rob set up the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in Ireland. He is author of The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion, and publishes www.transitionculture.org, recently voted the 4th best green blog in the UK.

Tom Crompton has worked on values and social change for nearly a decade, initially with WWF’s, whose work whose work in this area, Common Cause, started in 2008 with the publication of Tom’s report Weathercocks and Signposts. Currently, Tom is engaged in a productive collaboration involving WWF and Scope that is allowing them to test many of the principles advanced through Common Cause. Tom is now coordinating the establishment of The Common Cause Foundation.  His other publications include Meeting Environmental Challenges (co-authored with Tim Kasser).

Manda Scott is a novelist and spiritual teacher . Formerly a veterinary surgeon, she is author of the Boudica: Dreaming books and has taught for the past two years on the ‘Changing the Frame’ course at Schumacher college.  Since the publication of the Deep Adaptation paper in 2018, she has made it her focus to explore the ways by which we might make the next evolutionary step in humanity’s development, believing that a combination of the most recent neuroscience and ancient spiritual practice will provide us with a route to a different future.

Jonathan Dawson is a sustainability educator, currently working as coordinator of Schumacher College’s innovative Economics for Transition postgraduate programme. He has a deep fascination with the power of narrative and language to shape how we understand the world and as a potential source of radical change in the norms, values and behaviours of our societies.  Until recently a long-term resident at the Findhorn ecovillage and a former President of the Global Ecovillage Network, he has around 20 years’ experience as a researcher, author, consultant and project manager in the field of small enterprise development in Africa and South Asia. Jonathan is the principal author of the Gaia Education sustainable economy curriculum, drawn from best practice within ecovillages worldwide, that has been endorsed by UNITAR and adopted by UNESCO as a valuable contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. He has taught this curriculum at universities, ecovillages and community centres in Brazil, Spain and Scotland.

Jay is a co-founder of the Totnes REconomy Project, an associate lecturer in economics at Plymouth University as well as a regular teacher on our postrgraduate economics programmes.  He co-developed the Transition Network REconomy Project’s Local Economic Blueprint course and handbook, co-founded the REconomy Centre, and developed the Local Entrepreneur Forum model. He has worked with groups in many communities picking up these models. He has also developed a course on ‘Citizen-led Economics’, as well as led workshops and given talks in Europe, USA and Japan.

Before moving to the UK Jay was based in Silicon Valley in the US as an entrepreneur and consultant in the ‘green business movement’.  He holds an MBA from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a BA in Philosophy from San Jose State University. He’s also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.