Schirin Yachkaschi is a development practitioner and action researcher with a focus on organisational development (OD) and multi stakeholder process facilitation. Her background is in both social and environmental science, with a Masters degree in landscape and open space planning (University of Hanover, Germany), and a D-Phil in Development Management (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa). Her PhD-thesis was published as a book in 2009, with the title:
Between Goethe and Complexity: Towards an Organisational Development Approach for Community-based Organisations. Case studies from South Africa. Saarbrücken: VDM Publisher.
She has worked in Germany and South Africa as an OD consultant, process facilitator and researcher.
Schirin has extensive experience in organisational and personal development. She facilitates process work with individuals and organisations, multi-stakeholder processes as well as training courses (e.g. in multi-stakeholder dialogue facilitation, organisational development and related fields). She further works as researcher and writer for various universities and organisations.
Schirin began working as Reos associate in 2007 with Reos Johannesburg. She is currently working with Reos London as facilitator and trainer, and is co-facilitating the Effective Group Facilitation course.
Prior to that, she worked with the German Development Service in 2000-2001. She then became organisational development manager at Community Connections in Cape Town, where she developed and facilitated an organisational development programme for community-based organisations from 2001-2006. Since 2006, she is working on a freelance basis for organisations and institutions like the Synergos Institute, the University of Cape Town, the University of Marburg, the Collective Leadership Institute, the high school of Lucerne and the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Further than that, she offers workshops in personal development, using movement, dance and meditation (see http://www.spiraldances.com/index_en.html).
Her work is based on a people-centred and developmental approach, by engaging participants and encouraging reflection and learning from their own experiences and tapping into their own creativity. The approaches she uses are rooted in a complex systems perspective and include dialogue facilitation, appreciative inquiry, creative/artistic methods (dance, movement and meditation techniques), action learning and other approaches that foster individual and collective learning.
In her free time, Schirin is a passionate dancer of contact improvisation and Argentine tango. She reflects and recuperates in nature and is practicing meditation since 1990. She currently lives in Germany.