Kiara Nagel delivers training, consulting, and coordination services to foster collaboration and support equitable community development. She has studied the historical implications of development and patterns of forced displacement and worked to ensure those most affected would be directly engaged in decision-making about how their places would be shaped, understood and represented.

Kiara began organizing as a youth and went on to learn from experiences as a squatter, a city planner, a coalition builder, a project manager, an event planner, a dancer, a fundraiser, a trainer, and an MC. She now holds a Masters in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a fellow at The Design Studio 4 Social Intervention in Boston, USA.

Serving as faculty at University of Orange, a free people’s university, and Project Manager of a diverse network of women working to end the genocide in Sudan and build a global peace movement, allows her to connect anti-displacement struggles from New York, to New Orleans, El Salvador to Darfur and beyond.

Mostly, Kiara loves exploring special places people love and treasure or forgot and left behind, and is committed to working with colleagues around the globe who share her commitment to peace and justice.

Valentin Vollmer was born in 1979 in Germany. He grew up in Essen and studied social work and social pedagogy in Cologne. Since 1996 he has organized work camps in Brazil, Tanzania and Senegal.

His thesis, “Finding Identity in the Time of Globalisation,” provided an important background for his continued work with international youth projects and as a result he cofounded IDEM – Identity through Initiative, an international network supporting youth initiative and projects.

From 2004 to 2008 he was a full-time coordinator for IDEM in Basel, Switzerland, giving trainings for young people, facilitating workshops and giving presentations, and providing project support for small initiatives and work camps. In 2008 he founded “Connect Café Basel,” a local youth support and empowerment center in Basel.

See the YIP Contributor Interview with Valentin:

Orland combines a deep dedication to human rights advocacy and cultural renewal with an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology and indigenous cosmologies. He was a research fellow with the Center for the Study of Violence and Social Change at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles and has consulted with many human development organizations. As director of Shade Tree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge.

Shade Tree reaches into gang and drug cultures where many young people expect to die before the age of 20.

“These young people feel that they are not welcome in the world, in the culture and in the future,” Orland explains.

Shade Tree employs a unique process that draws on both contemporary and ancient practices, particularly that of the South African tradition of Indaba or “deep talk.” Hidden Forces of the American Dream refers to the creative, still unused powers available to the American people and land that were released through tremendous sacrifices made over the course of American history by Native Americans, African slaves and waves of immigrants.

See the YIP Contributor Interview with Orland Bishop:

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Watch the YIP Public Lecture with Orland Bishop:

It is minus 20 degree Celsius in Ytterjärna, the YIP students are off to their international internships all over the world, but Spring is coming and so is Initiative Forum. Preperations are in full swing….