The Sparks of Regeneration Open Call is supported by an extraordinary group of facilitators, designers, and strategic thinkers who bring deep experience in systems change, community building, and transformative learning. Together, they are guiding the cohort through an incubation journey rooted in care, rigor, and regenerative practice.
Berlin, Germany
Blasius Walch brings together many backgrounds: engineering, psychology, international relations and design thinking all come together to make him a true interdisciplinarian. Over the past 5 years, he has been working with Politics for Tomorrow, working internally on organisational development and finances, and externally as a project manager and facilitator for different projects including capacity building programmes for development organisations, strategy implementation for local city governments, and citizen participation projects around sustainability topics. He is a hospicing volunteer, has a strong interest in existential risks and systemic analysis of the challenges of our time, and currently does facilitator training in the Work that Reconnects.
Blasius leads community involvement for Sparks of Regeneration and contributes to the programme’s strategic learning design, co-facilitating sessions and mentoring peers while ensuring the cohort’s development remains grounded and rigorous.
Gaborone, Botswana
Dr Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon is an ecosystem shepherd and knowledge architect for social change endeavours, organisations and communities. He’s conducted cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial research, training and analysis in Botswana for nearly a decade, and researched with Fortune 500 executives, nonprofit leaders and local changemakers — channelling those insights into diverse and impactful social change curricula. He’s partnered with incubation and social change communities including Disrupt Development, the Alliance for African Partnership, either/org, and many others. Pierce has built leadership programmes for entrepreneurs, politicians, community organisers and human-centred designers across Bostwana, the contiguous United States and beyond.
Pierce stewards the connective work of the cohort: weaving relationships with partners and stakeholders, coordinating strategy and programme delivery, stewarding the retreat environment, and co-facilitating peer learning and mentoring across the cohort.
Berlin, Germany
Prateek Shankar is strategic designer, writer and educator working at the intersection of systems design and transition, governance, social justice, decoloniality and language. He is currently Mission Lead of Planetary Civics at Dark Matter Labs, where he develops new institutional and civic mechanisms to respond to the multiple interconnected and cascading crises affecting our planet today. Trained in architecture, visual design and cultural studies, his work brings together design, qualitative research, strategic foresight, pedagogy and civic imagination to explore how societies can reorient toward multispecies justice, systemic resilience and radical post-global futures. He has taught art and design history, critical theory and strategic design at the Rhode Island School of Design and RMIT Melbourne, and was a Strategic Design Fellow at the Center for Complexity.
Prateek’s role in the cohort involves maintaining the programme’s knowledge infrastructure, driving learning, sensemaking and synthesis, informing programme and research design, and co-facilitating sessions and peer mentoring.
Barcelona, Spain
Toban Shadlyn is a strategic designer and educator whose work fosters transdisciplinary collaboration, systemic transitions, and place-based transformation. With over a decade of experience working with local and national governments, research institutions, philanthropic foundations, and community-based organisations worldwide, Toban brings expertise in applying design to complex challenges in healthcare, education, policy and urban development. She was a founding member of Rhode Island School of Design's Center for Complexity, a pioneering platform for research, experimentation and design focused on systemic challenges. She has taught at RISD and the University of Michigan, and currently directs the Master of Strategic Design in Complexity at Elisava University in Barcelona, Spain.
At Sparks of Regeneration, Toban co-leads the overall programme design and learning journey, designing the structure, pacing and pedagogic approach of the cohort, and serving as a key facilitator and peer mentor across the programme.
