Marianne is an experienced facilitator and designer of group learning and co-creation processes.
She is passionate about supporting people in coming together in more authentic and life-affirming ways to, together, find solutions to complex challenges and help shift stuck systems. Marianne splits her time between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
In South Africa Marianne’s work has focused on multistakeholder dialogue and action around the challenge of orphans and vulnerable children, both at national level, and in a local initiative to develop innovative solutions to build the community’s capacity to serve the children. She is also working to help build capacity among fellow practitioners in the field of social innovation through facilitating Reos Partners Institute Events.
In Zimbabwe she founded Kufunda Learning Village, a learning centre aimed at the creation of locally rooted solutions to community self-reliance challenges, through the use of people’s own imagination, collaboration and resources. Through this work Marianne was elected an Ashoka Fellow (www.ashoka.org) in 2004 and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum ( www.weforum.org) in 2009.
In 1999 she co-founded Pioneers of Change. www.pioneersofchange.net, a global learning community that fosters understanding, capacities and relationships needed by younger practitioners committed to stepping forward and creating the change they want to see in the world.
She holds a masters degree in international business and finance from the business school of Copenhagen.
During her studies, she served as president AIESEC International (www.aiesec.net), a global student organisation of 50,000 (primarily business) students from 87 countries.