About Us
Our Values
Courage: Heart and Love in Action
Courage to be vulnerable and yet not be stopped by what we feel. In facing our fear, releasing blame, we courageously move through our feelings and emotions. In turn, bringing heart and love into the way we communicate and the actions we take. Courage enables us to bring our authentic, bold and audacious selves forward.
Integrity: Restoring Wholeness
Integrity means restoring wholeness, by healing deep wounds of the past, mending what has been broken, restoring what has been discarded, awakening to our highest expression. Awakening to the ways in which we are bound together and interconnected with all sentient beings and our natural world.
Faith: Trust in What We Know to Be true
Intuition is the source of faith. Coming from source, we listen to the quiet whispers of the soul and what we know to be true. Following our intuition and guided by our lived experience, the wisdom of our body, and the core of our inner strength we follow our inner principles, conscience and truth.
Commitment: Taking an Authentic Stand
Staying true to what we stand for, taking up our responsibility for what is uniquely ours to bring at this time, and keeping our word even in times of disruption and uncertainty. Ensuring in all decision making our actions, words, thoughts and values are in alignment with our principles.
Devotion: Protecting What Matters Most
Devotion is the quality that enables us to fulfill our vision, our soul’s quest. In devotion we bring our wholehearted and focused attention to care for and protect what matters most to us. The virtue of devotion can shift in a heartbeat from mindful nurturing care to a fiery force that protects.
Meet the Team
Karen Lee Downes
Co-Founder / Executive Director
Over the span of her 35-year career, Karen has founded and launched successful start-ups, supported social change initiatives to transform entrenched cultural norms, developed and led transformational leadership programmes around the world. She is a healer above all else. At the beginning of her career, she trained in five alternative healthcare disciplines, building a multi-million-dollar Aromatherapy company from kitchen tabletop to global business success story, her mission was to ‘return natural healing modalities to the healers; women’.
Karen Wooldridge
Core Team Member / Non Executive Director
I stand for PEACE, INTEGRITY and a FLOURISHING FUTURE for all. With the wholeness of INTEGRITY, we create the peace to live flourishing lives. As a catalyst of transformation with The Flourish Initiative and FEMMEQ, I have discovered through my own feminine intelligence that no age is too young or too old to begin experiencing a new perspective to create what we dream and cherish in our hearts. I believe PEACE and HOPE for a flourishing future begins with my own daily practice of stillness and then action to follow to make a difference.
Judith Hafner
Core Team member / Connector
With my background in languages (German, Italian, English, French, Chinese), I spent 15 years in France, South Africa, Germany, China and Norway before I came back to my home in Northern Italy. Now I live near Bolzano, with the forest as my daily coach, and coordinate, together with four other women, the network future.bz.it. It connects local civil engagement to the Sustainable Development Goals. The purpose of our network has shifted to partnerships (SDG 17) as we sensed into the need for bridging perspectives and nourishing the mutual understanding between local stakeholders of sustainability. Stretching our hearts into the field beyond the blames, beyond what we consider right seems crucial to change. We try to create a relational field playfully (see We-Games) and with genuine curiosity.
Ludmila Lipskaya
Core Team Member / Communications
Ludmila is a visionary entrepreneur and the founder of New Feminine, a practical call for modern women to fully embody and express their gift of Womanhood and Sacred Feminine. Ludmila is a Kundalini yoga teacher, Feminine spiritual mentor, and a facilitator of women’s circles and retreats. During her life journey, she worked in arts, computer science, business, life coaching, yoga for personal transformation, channelling, sound healing and tantric numerology. These personal experiences and learnings led her to understanding of the complexities of being a Modern woman.
Laetitia Thomas
Core Team Member
Laetitia Thomas, MBA, Ph.D., is a researcher, facilitator, consultant, and entrepreneur seeking to accelerate a regenerative economy. She empowers entrepreneurs and organizations to become global leaders through responsible innovation. Her multicultural background includes cross-divisional experience in teaching, researching, and practicing sustainable design. She enjoys bringing awareness to social and environmental impacts through play, making, collective intelligence, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence.