Economics Lab

THE SPEAKERS

Carlota Sanz Ruiz

Carlota Sanz leads the development of Doughnut Economics Action Lab's (DEAL) emerging strategy. She combines her corporate experience with her passion for regenerative economics to design DEAL in a way that is future-fit.

Carlota was co-director of Economy for the Common Good UK and continues to be a member of ECG's Knowledge Hub, which continually refines ECG's standards for business accreditation and transformation.
For over 10 years, she worked as a management consultant in the financial sector in Spain , for KPMG, Deloitte, Santander and Metro Bank, based in Spain and the UK.

Timi Merriman-Johnson

Timi Merriman-Johnson is an award-winning financial content creator, podcaster, author and founder of Mr MoneyJar, a UK-based financial education

Gabriela Cabaña

Gabriela is an anthropologist and Ph researcher at the LSE and part of Centro de Análisis Socioambiental, an organisation working in critiques of development in Chile. She is also part of Degrowth London

Jesse Griffiths

Jesse is CEO at the Finance Innovation Lab, leading the Lab’s work to build a financial system that serves people and planet.
Prior to joining the Lab, Jesse was Director of the Development Strategy and Finance Programme at ODI, an international think tank, where he led a research and policy team working on how to finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Prior to that, Jesse was Director of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), a network of 50 European civil society organisations (CSOs) working for transformative changes to global and European policies, institutions and structures to ensure an environmentally sustainable financial and economic system that works to eradicate poverty and ensure human rights for all. Before that he was Coordinator of the Bretton Woods Project, a watchdog of the World Bank and IMF, and worked for ActionAid UK on development finance policy. He has also worked for the Department for International Development (DFID) and various other non–governmental organisations, on both development finance and international environmental policy.

Saamah Abdallah

Saamah has been working in the fields of wellbeing and alternative indicators of progress since 2006, when he worked on the original Happy Planet Index whilst working at the think tank the New Economics Foundation. Since then, Saamah has contributed to numerous initiatives in this space including the Santa Monica Wellbeing Index, the inclusion of wellbeing measures in UK and EU official statistics, and the initial stages of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing in the UK. In 2016 Saamah won the award for Emerging Leader in the field of Community Indicators. As of March 2023, Saamah is Programme Lead for Sustainable Wellbeing at the Hot or Cool Institute – a think tank based in Berlin working on systemic change and sustainable lifestyles.

Tom Bailey

Tom Bailey is the co-founder of Take the JUMP and spent six years with C40 Cities as Head of Research and then Head of the Sustainable Consumption program. The JUMP involves making six shifts that you can take, that feel positive and fun – have a huge impact in protecting our earth, and have a fabulous time as you do it!

Matthew Slater

Matthew Slater has been building open-source software for LETS and other community currencies since the 2008 financial crisis. He also created a MOOC with Prof Jem Bendell, and the Credit Commons protocol for community exchange. He also writes occasional articles on money and sustainability, runs workshops, and records audiobooks.

Karl Harder

Karl has founded three value led businesses. Currently he is co-founder and Managing Director of Abundance Investment - the world's first regulated crowdfunding platform. Abundance enables people to invest from as little as £5 to fund the decarbonisation of the UK in the process raising capital for companies and councils delivering Net Zero projects such as wind farms, green social housing and tidal stream projects. Abundance aims to empower people so they can use their savings to create positive change in the world.

Franz Josef Allmayer

Franz Josef Allmayer is a citizen of SEEDS with cultural roots in Austria and Guatemala. These contrasting yet complementary perspectives have allowed him to question existing cultural paradigms built on scarcity and separation from an early age.
Upon witnessing first-hand the ramifications of the market failures of anthropocenic proportions, it became clear to him that the way we have organized money causes many of the challenges we face today. Reshaping and repurposing money such that it serves a world in which people and the planet thrive, motivates Franz to create the tools, processes, and on-the-ground collaborations to support the development of bioregional economies of abundance.

Nigel Berman

Nigel is founder and CEO of School of the Wild, a company that brings businesses and organisations into nature to reconnect with the wild and each other. Nigel is passionate about the power of connecting with nature to help build better relationships and founded School of the Wild to create space for meaningful conversations that lead to change in the way people work and live. Nigel has spent 25 years leading businesses that communicate different ways of seeing the world.

Santiago Villegas

Santiago is a writer, meditation teacher and mindset coach, committed to helping a new generation of leaders transform the chaos of the disorganised mind into an aligned structure that allows them to create sustainable progress towards meaningful goals by focusing on building the processes required to connect systematically with the optimal experience of flow, from the inside out.

Dil Green

Pragmatic utopian, a designer at heart, Dil works to support the emergence of the best future we can imagine, starting right here, right now, with what we have, having cognisance of Christopher Alexander's principle of 'structure preserving transformations'.

Dil's current focus is on the cultural understanding of money as a reified uber-commodity which is necessarily scarce, a framing which sits deep in the systemic drivers of our extractive, competitive, auto-destructive economy, acting like a semi-autonomous, out-of-control machine for turning the biosphere into dollar tokens.

Alicia Carey

Alicia is Chief Executive of Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking and is passionate about protecting our environment and supporting people to make positive change. Alicia shows how building trust, embodying values and allowing just the right level of risk enables opportunities to flourish. Collaboration, curiosity and warmth characterise her interactions at every level. In 10 years at Hawkwood CFT, Alicia's unique leadership style has brought financial abundance, ethical awareness, international recognition and creative zest. Hawkwood welcomes exceptional leaders across sustainability, business, wellbeing and the arts to provide a cultural education programme that supports every individual to fulfil their potential.

Priscila Pabon

Priscila Pabon is the Digital Wizz Curator at Hawkwood CFT. Born and living in the Global South, Priscila is a creator of beauty and seamlessness and works with a passionate fire that brings vitality to her work. With expansive curiosity, Priscila explores diverse cultures and indigenous lifestyles and her care for the planet is precisely done within every aspect of her work.

Natali Martinez Riobo

For Natali, creativity, self-expression and culture is what makes life colourful. The centre of her vision is and has always been the richness and spirit of community. Born and partly raised within an impoverished village in the mountains of Colombia, she has lived within a richly diverse culture. Her inspiration of living outside capitalist societal standards and her deep passion & connection to the natural world was born from a young age as a consequence. Natali is the Head of Marketing and passionate about bringing the spirit of Hawkwood's work to as many people as possible.