Why Sociocracy For All
(SoFA)?

Ted is a linguist, and singer-songwriter.Ted is co-authors of the sociocracy handbook Many Voices, One Song. He enjoys writing articles, and teaching meeting facilitation. People and their universal need to connect and move things are at the center of his attention. He pays attention to the co-housing movement, transgender rights and non-violent communication.

The training in linguistics taught Ted to find patterns that work well for the human mind, to work empirically and break things down so they can be understood. Being a parent of 5 had taught him to be extremely pragmatic; at the end of the day, dinner must be on the table no matter whether the new vision statement is done.

Spanish Philologist, Filmmaking and Master in International Humanitarian Action NOHA (Network On Humanitarian Action). I’ve been always involved in works related to communication, education and group facilitation. I’ve worked for different Organizations related to Earth, Women and the Peasant Movement. I’m member o “El Semillero” (Agroecology Organization) and “Mujeres del Volcán de Agua”. Both of them use Sociocracy. Currently, I’m committed to the implementation of Sociocracy in groups and organizations as a useful tool for empowering groups and people.

Imagine a world where people enjoy working equitably together to meet personal and planetary needs. Jerry helps companies and organizations implement sociocracy to create adaptive and effective organizations where all members’ voices matter. He is a consultant and certified trainer in both Dynamic Governance/ Sociocracy and Compassionate Communication (NVC).

He has been a Board member of the Institute for Community Economics, United for a Fair Economy and Class Action, and a trainer with Movement for a New Society, the National Coalition Building Institute, DiversityWorks, Cambridge Youth Peace & Justice Corps, Lesley College Center for Peaceable Schools, Boston College Center for Social Justice, the Association for Resident Controlled Housing, and Spirit in Action.

Jerry is a founding and current resident of Pioneer Valley Cohousing, a 21-year old community in Amherst MA that has been successfully using sociocracy (aka Dynamic Governance) for the last 6 years.

Fascinated by “Deep Technologies of Transformation” and what Paul Hawkins named as “the largest social movement in human history”, Laureen supports “Paradigm-Shifters” who want to be more effective and create greater impact.

Who is a Paradigm Shifter? A visionary ...

• forging new paths towards a world where all needs matter
• restoring wholeness and well-being within the systems they care most about
• healing themselves to heal their family, school, organization, communities, ecosystem and world
• playing their part in catalyzing game-changing, world-wide, whole-system social transformation

Vincent is a management consultant focusing on continuous improvement and respect for people, based in Europe, with 15 years working experience in and with small to large organisations. He realized that most existing problems in organisations are caused by the system of thinking. Becoming aware of these assumptions and mental models, understanding and changing them to create more sustainable impact became his mission. Vincent reads about 2 books a week, because he’d rather do one day’s of good work by learning from people who have done it before than twenty years of bad. He enjoys keeping up to date on emerging practices and making approaches like Sociocracy/Holacracy, Lean and agile, Kanban, NVC, Clean Language, UX, Digital Analytics and systems thinking useful for clients. Recently he has started translating books on agile into german to help spread sustainable working practices.

Nara spent 18 years in the corporate world, particularly in project management. She has a Masters in Business IT and PMP-PMI certification. She made a transition traveling by ecovillages and dwelling 2 years in Findhorn, Scotland. Since 2009, she studied interpersonal and intrapersonal topics, such as Biopsychology, Dragon Dreaming, Sociocracy, NVC and Coaching.

At the moment, she serves as a consultant in the area of self-management and collaboration. She is co-founder of BioInspiral, a collective of consultants, coaches, and trainers who seek to resemble a regenerative culture in the organization and of Sociocracia Brasil, teaching and consulting there.

Andy has a background in information service with nonprofits. He is passionate about healthy food access, seeking to introduce sociocracy to food co-ops and a regional mobile market initiative. He is also engaged in a dialog with his Quaker community to demonstrate the compatibility of sociocracy with work at the committee level.

Andy's learning about sociocracy is ongoing, starting with SoLT #1 and continuing with the SoFA Academy. Professionally, he is in a half-time staff role with SoFA.

By avocation, Andy is a photographer who is feeling drawn to painting. He lives with his partner Mona in a cohousing community and has two young-adult children.

John has a life-long career working to improve the workplace. This began member of an independent student labor union, the now defunct Memorial Union Labor Organization on the UW-Madison Campus, and continued for 26 years at the taxicab cooperative, Union Cab of Madison as a director and manager. While at Union Cab, he worked with other members to flatten hierarchy and help create space for more members’ voices in the decision-making process. He also came to recognize that traditional meeting practices create useless and unnecessary antagonistic relationships.

Over the last ten or so years, John has worked with the larger co-op movement as a founding member, director, and president of the US Federation of Worker Co-ops, a founding member and governor of the Democracy at Work Network, and graduate student research assistant as a graduate student in co-op management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax where he earned a Masters in Management: Co-operatives and Credit Unions and is a Ph.D. Candidate in management. His research work included the development of the Co-op Index Report, a tool to measure a co-operatives expression of cooperative values and principles. Currently John works full-time as a cooperative developer for the Northwest Cooperative Development Center in Olympia, WA engaging with a diverse group of co-operatives as well as leading NWCDC’s Co-operative Academy.  John teaches on cooperative management in Presidio Graduate School’s Seattle campus in the spring and The Evergreen State College in the summer. John first learned of Sociocracy at NWCDC which has partnered with Jerry Koch-Gonzalez for conference workshops. John embraced Sociocracy as a governance model that engages the cooperative identity especially the ethical values of openness and honesty. He joined the first cohort of the Sociocracy Leadership Training program and now includes units on Sociocracy in his courses and the academy. He encourages all clients to at least consider the model for their co-operatives as well and hopes to see it grow throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Pierre is a transition trainer and facilitator that one day started asking why we have to use the majority and minority to decide. He got in touch with sociocracy, falling in love quite immediately.
Living in Italy, where sociocracy was not well known yet, he surfed the web in search of information, training, coaching, books, videos. When he came across Sociocracy For All, he was excited right away. He was the first to sign for the SoFA newsletter once it was out and became an early collaborator and member of SoFA. He is amazed to see the dream of SoFA growing and growing; he feels it is just the right place to be.

Thanks to all the training he could access through internet and with SoFA support, he started to give Intro workshops on Sociocracy and to support people who want to implement it. In his dreams, there is a network of Italian Sociocracy experts, trainers, facilitators, in connection with the wider international network, that use Sociocracy in synergy with other tools to support the change “we the people” want to bring in the world.

Pierre's SoFA Interview

Karen Peitzmeier joined the Peace Corps Coverdell Fellows team in June of 2005 as Internal Coordinator and the Illinois Cooperative Development Center in 2016. She has an MA in Leisure Studies from Oklahoma State University and a BS in Recreation and Park Administration from Western Illinois University.

As the Internal Coordinator, her responsibilities include recruitment of prospective Fellows, placement of on campus and local graduate assistantships, training development and coordination. Karen also assists with internship supervision and community recruitment.
Karen joined the Illinois Cooperative Development Center as a Cooperative Development Specialist in 2016. She specializes in developing leadership skills within groups and assists with board formation, membership organization and facilitating group dynamics.

Karen served as the Program Coordinator for Horn Field Campus of WIU for nine years and has training in wilderness and environmental education, therapeutic recreation and small group dynamics. She has served as an environmental education consultant to the Partners of America Illinois-Sao Paulo Brazil chapter. She has a passion for rock climbing, kayaking and delights in visiting new and interesting places.

Harris thinks you can learn as much about a person from their failures as their successes. Particularly so when their successes are very rare. In the past 20 years, Harris has demonstrably failed in the most convincing manner to create a better world as he originally set out to do when he first blu-tacked a poster of Che Guevara in his student room. He has been consistently disappointed by formal education but at least he took his own back by dropping out of a PhD scholarship just at the point when he was meant to be finishing. His lack of academic ambition recommended him to deeply insecure professors who dreaded being surpassed by their brilliant students and he found himself working as a university researcher. Before that he had found some ephemeral satisfaction in public service but soon the financial crisis came and thankfully the bad public service was duly sacrificed to the altar of saving the nice banks. Harris studied psychology and sociology and consequently he cannot be relied on to do anything practical around the house other than cook vegetarian meals. He would have preferred to have studied about being a good person, enjoying life and respecting and caring for others. He realised that this kind of education you have to get for yourself in institutions that actually have values beyond the number of zeros in their cash reserves. Which is how he found sociocracy. Harris thinks he is loved by his partner and friends but suspects they only stay close because he does the cooking. Please get in touch on Medium and Twitter: @Harri_Kaloudis – but not if you are looking for someone to do the cooking

Eric currently resides and revolts in his home metropolis of Mexico City, Mexico. He became exposed to cooperativism while studying highschool in Minnesota, United States. He has ever since dedicated his life to building a resilient Solidarity Economy that will transcend the current period of crisis. He is a graduate of the very first SoLT cycle, where he first encountered Sociocracy. Eric sees Sociocracy as a handy tool in the development and strengthening of coops, but also as an important paradigm shift: a way to relate to one’s peers in an anti-oppressive fashion. He likes to think that the success of our species relies primarily on teamwork, and that his role in our society is to facilitate and spread efficient teamwork. With an inclination towards the humorous and a strong commitment to liberation, Eric currently forms part of the Cooperative Circle in SoFA, spreads Sociocracy in Mexico through ELC, and helps to weave the Mexican Solidarity Economy at https://vientos.coop

Simon’s focus is enabling organisations to communicate and operate across their natural boundaries and deliver more effective outcomes. By leveraging hands-on engineering and leadership experience, alongside MBA studies, he is able to empathise with, and work across, disciplines to understand both the detail and the wider picture.
His developing experience in Systems Thinking and Sociocracy help him carefully question assumptions, grasp underlying patterns and better understand broader sets of views in order to help organisations reach stronger, sustainable solutions.

Andreas is a Permaculture Designer and Diploma holder, and tries to enter Sociocracy from a holistic and organic world view. He uses Sociocracy as a teaching method to create group culture, distribute power to peoples own aims, and at the same enabling people taking responsibility for their whole learning processes – within co-learning and individually. Besides teaching, we lives with my family at their farm and homestead, where they try to grow the food they need and generate the land and resources that the future needs. He also has the role of Principal at Holma Folkhögskola in the south of Sweden. The school is built on the Permaculture Ethics and Principles, and it is run sociocratically by all 20+ fantastic co-workers, and it continually caters to around 100-150 students in adult education. He considers both Sociocracy and Permaculture to be ongoing design frameworks within living systems, and the synergies between the two could be integrated everywhere we find human beings.

Randall is a Christian pastor interested in implementing sociocratic practices in religious organizations.  He finds sociocratic principles highly consistent with what Scripture teaches about the nature of the human psyche and God’s requirements for how people should treat one another and value one another.

Since 2010, I have been part of a sociocratic organization, Cohabitat Québec, the first cohousing community in eastern Canada. We moved in in June 2013. At Cohabitat Québec, I learned compassionate communication and sociocracy. With my future neighbors, we coordinated the design and construction of this project alongside professionals (architects, contractors, engineers). My experience with sociocracy was so positive that I decided to start a consulting practice in collaborative coaching. I hope to spread sociocracy and other self-management practices more widely. I firmly believe that humans can reinvent the way they collaborate in order to build a better and more inclusive world. My background is in psychological science that I teach at the college level. I speak French and English.

Lucas is a brazilian, computer geek, focus on creating a co-housing community where humane relationships flourish, using sociocracy and permaculture as guides. He has been implementing sociocracy in a to-be co-housing community and in a Waldorf kindergarten for a few years. He is also developing a birth-related activities center in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.

Wendy is a mother, a partner, a friend, a neighbour, a midwife and an advocate for intentional community living and sociocracy! She has been hosting a weekly Wednesday night potluck dinner at her home since 2007. They are never canceled, and they even occur (in her home) when she can’t attend. Her neighbours really know each other and help each other out. She is building community one meal at a time, with close to 600 potlucks since the beginning. She is also a co-founder of a forming co-housing group in the Kitchener-Waterloo region in Ontario, Canada.

Former R&D engineer (15 years), actual consultant and trainer (15 years) for project management area (including Agile methods). I had training in sociocracy at TSG, mentoring with John Buck, and participation in circle meetings. I am promoting sociocracy in Romania for over 5 years through public presentations, seminars, social media.

Matthew McNatt is a learning and development specialist with a passion for movement-based education, dynamic governance, and mindful decision-making. A Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner and founding member of the Eugene Alliance for Somatic Education (EASE), Matthew has extensive experience equipping people of all ages to direct their attention, coordinate their movements, and develop their intelligence. He is blessed to routinely “make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant.”

Matthew’s experience with sociocracy includes his time at EASE (a sociocratically governed worker cooperative) and at the HANDLE Institute (an international nonprofit, where while President of the Board, Matthew was instrumental in the HANDLE Institute’s adoption of sociocracy).

Matthew’s professional background includes founding and directing an educational organization for 14 years in the Illinois Valley, where he invented software to give students feedback about their attention; developed fonts to improve reading speed; and created the 8 Questions, a transformational heuristic that improves decision-making and group cohesion by clarifying commitments; preserving awareness of needs; and establishing a common, reorienting practice.

Oscar Kjellberg has taught sociocracy both in English and Swedish since 2016. Formerly CEO of the member-owned cooperative JAK Members Bank in Sweden and co-founder of the Sambruket cooperative association in Sweden, Oscar is an active Board Member at the Holma Folk High School where he builds strategic connections with local community groups. Oscar is active in several initiatives within the Transition movement, and is an often-featured lecturer who advocates permaculture, sociocracy and transition as part of supporting thriving local community economies in a post-oil, convivial degrowth world.

Hope Wilder is the founder of Pathfinder Community School, a self-directed learning center for ages 5-14 using sociocracy in Durham, North Carolina. She has been working in alternative and outdoor environmental education for over a dozen years, and was inspired by the dream of starting a democratic free school in April 2016. Once she found sociocracy, she was determined to figure out how to make this effective and consent-based participatory governance work with young people. She is helping others organize around sociocracy in schools in the SoFA as well as practicing day to day with the Pathfinder group. She enjoys making art & music, DIY fashion, and being outside.

A Certified Sociocratic Organizational Consultant, John heads operations in TSCG’s Washington, DC region.

John has led dozens of Dynamic Governance implementation projects for a variety of organizations, resulting in greater efficiency and increased employee engagement. He believes that such basic values as equality, liberty, and transparency can make our work places dramatically more sustainable, elegant, and profitable.

He excels in customizing Dynamic Governance principles to each organization’s particular concerns, work schedules, and professional areas. His clients span the globe and include plastics manufacturers, colleges and universities, long-term care facilities, co-housing groups, and software companies. John was the first person outside of The Netherlands to receive consultant certification from the Sociocratisch Centrum (now The Sociocracy Group) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He has translated numerous documents from the original Dutch and is coauthor (with Sharon Villines) of We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, and recently published AgileBossanova with Jutta Eckstein.