Forest – Designing and facilitating the Citizens Council

Elise Cuny
Elise has a background in European affairs and International relations and has mainly focused until now on the relations between the EU and the African continent. She previously worked for the Brussels-based think tank Egmont Institute designing and implementing training for civil servants, diplomats and civilian crisis management experts as part of Belgium’s diplomatic and foreign affairs policies. She then spent three years in Kigali, Rwanda as part of an international team of investigators looking at the role of France in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a topic that led her to think about the common management of historical memory. She loves to look at the human factor in the different fields she specializes in and has strong quality of team and project management.

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Stephen Boucher
Partner

Stephen Boucher is the founder of Dreamocracy and of the non-profit Smarter Together. He specialises in combining deep understanding of politics and policy making with deep mastery of collective creativity and collective intelligence. As such, he currently advises and sits on the board of a number of organisations, notably the Council on Economic Policies and the European Citizen Action Service. He is also senior expert for the Egmont Institute, advising and training civil servants in Belgium, Ukraine, Mali, Guinea Conakry, Palestine, the DRC and other countries.

Before that, Stephen had a diverse career in public affairs and lobbying of ideas. He held in particular the following positions: Managing Director of Fondation EURACTIV, CEO of consoGlobe.com (at the time France’s largest online media on sustainable lifestyles), director for European policy at the European Climate Foundation (ECF), co-director of the Jacques Delors Institute, advisor on EU matters of a Belgian federal minister, lobbying consultant in London and Brussels, and lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Cairo.

With this wealth of experience in policy-making, notably at EU level, Stephen is particularly concerned about the threat that the lack of trust in quality media poses to the foundations of democracy, and how our lack of genuine creativity in policymaking undermines democracy and fosters populist movements.

A Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Sciences Po Paris graduate, Stephen Boucher has published several books and articles related to politics. He initiated and coordinated The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance (2017, with some 70 contributors), published Le petit manuel de créativité politique – Comment libérer l’audace collective (2017), as well as books on think tanks and energy policy matters. He also teaches on issues related to policy innovation, civic techs and political influence at Sciences Po in Paris, at the Solvay Brussels School and at the Institute of European Studies (ULB), and at the European Institute (CIFE).

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Elise Cuny
Advisor Smarter Together, Brussels

Elise has a background in European affairs and International relations and has mainly focused until now on the relations between the EU and the African continent. She previously worked for the Brussels-based think tank Egmont Institute designing and implementing training for civil servants, diplomats and civilian crisis management experts as part of Belgium’s diplomatic and foreign affairs policies. She then spent three years in Kigali, Rwanda as part of an international team of investigators looking at the role of France in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a topic that led her to think about the common management of historical memory. She loves to look at the human factor in the different fields she specializes in and has strong quality of team and project management.

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Victor Lauret
Junior Advisor, Brussels

After an engineering degree at Polytech Sorbonne, Victor Lauret started to work on environmental issues in Madagascar. First contributing on empowering the young generation on climate change, he then worked with the think-tank INDRI, mobilizing stakeholders and using collective intelligence to foster sustainable development. He is now advisor at Dreamocracy, where he keeps developing his passion for collective intelligence as a key ingredient for better public policies and environmental actions.

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Pauline Tawil
Senior Advisor, Antananarivo

Pauline specializes in advocacy, governance, and change management. After about 10 years in the Brussels’ EU bubble – mostly working on environmental and sustainability issues – she took a break that led her to the southwest of Madagascar where she first did voluntary community work for a British marine conservation NGO. It was love at first sight and she was offered a full-time coordinating position for 2 years on the ground. The experience was life changing and confirmed that collective intelligence should be the beating heart of any attempt to understand and address the complexity of the challenges our societies face. A passionate advocate of people’s intelligence and ability to change, Pauline has settled in Antananarivo and provides counsel in governance and advocacy, based on collective intelligence methods and tools.

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Caroline R. Cullière
Senior Advisor, Brussels

Caroline R. Cullière has over 10 years experience as an accomplished ‘launcher’, working in both the profit and non-profit sectors, leading operations, general strategy and implementation methodologies to improve team performance in complex environments. She is an expert in entrepreneurship, innovation, business growth, negotiation, and crisis management. She has launched different successful startups. She created the Amiens Cluster, an incubator and accelerator in the French Picard region. She was full time partnership developer for Paris & Co, Europe’s first incubation network with 14 innovation hubs. She was COO for Obilab Music, a company that aims to spread music practice using affordable instruments. Caroline is also an experienced campaigner and local policy catalyst, with particular expertise in French and Middle East politics. She launched Agora, a Citizen engagement tool. She is a Diplomat member of the Jewish Diplomatic Corps, World Jewish Congress, working with permanent delegations to UNESCO on the Anti-Semitic problem, interfaith dialogues, and Israël advocacy. She is also a German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Inclusion Leaders Network Alumni ‘19.
Graduated from ESSEC Business School and from Tel Aviv University with a MA in Public Policy, she owns a certificate in counter-terrorism from Leiden University and is a certified mediator.
She currently also acts as New Financing Models Coordinator at Zero Waste Europe

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Cécile Huylebroeck
Senior Advisor, Brussels

Cécile works as Stakeholder Manager, Change Facilitator and Leadership Coach to accompany private and public structures in their capabilities for optimisation, transition and change. Commissioned by companies, federations, NGOs or associations, she manages socio-economic projects aiming at contributing positively to society on matters such as sustainability, employment, education, immigration, mobility, smart cities, European integration and federalism.

Cécile holds a Bachelor and a Master’s Degree in Politics from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She’s also Personal Certified Coach (PCC) trained by the Leading and Coaching Academy in Brussels, certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF). Next to specific expertise, such as Transactional Analysis (TA), Neuro Language Processing (NLP), Non-Violent Communication (NVC), Process Communication Model (PCM), and Neuro-Cognitive and Behavioural Approach, she also recently obtained the accreditation at Insights DiscoveryÆ.
She is continuously looking for inspiration through conferences and training programs related to transition management, personal development, and collective intelligence.

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Cécile Poujade
Senior Advisor, Paris

Cécile Poujade is a Design Strategist with 20 years of experience in leading design projects for various organisations in Europe, Japan, Brazil and beyond. Cécile was Partner at Saguez & Partners, one of Europe’s best design agency, for 15 years, with clients such as Vinci Airports, Nature & Découvertes, Aéroport de Genève, Aéroports de Paris, Salomon, GRU Airport, Nespresso, Fnac, Orange, Pernod-Ricard, SNCF, Groupe Casino… Experienced in aligning decision makers, boards and teams around a strategic and creative vision for the project, she’s an expert in developing powerful concept, whatever the « object »: a service, an airport, a store, a brand. With a strong interest in education and citizenship, she co-founded Design Act! in 2016, with Olivier Saguez and Strate Design.Somewhere between a school and a lab, Design Act! is a non-profit 5-month training programme fostering social innovation and design projects. She founded Les Relieurs in 2020, a start-up based on her conviction that creativity combined with a committed strategy are a powerful way to move organisations and people. Having worked with many different stakeholders on projects involving private companies, citizens, urbanism and state services, Cécile loves to bring people together around a shared interest. She’s involved in the development of Agir pour le vivant, a non-profit French event taking place in Arles, Liège and Medelin, founded by Comuna and Actes Sud, that initiates debates, conferences and decision making around life on this planet.Today, she both advises or facilitates projects, with a strong focus on social innovation and climate change, for which she deploys the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) approach.Trained both in applied arts at l’École Estienne in Paris and semiotics at Celsa Sorbonne, Cécile’s mindset always combines strategy with creativity, prospective with functionality.

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Samuel Fluckiger
Senior Advisor, Brussels

As a dedicated sustainability professional with over 10 years of experience in various public policy related to climate, energy, environment, and mobility matters, Samuel has developed proven strategies to cultivate positive, forward-looking, and sustainable change.

With multifaceted leadership experience across non-profit and public sectors and considerable exposure to the private sector, Samuel has the skills and knowledge to foster innovative and sound solutions to overcome complex environment and energy-related challenges.

In addition to strong communication skills, he has a proven ability to identify and address challenges head-on, as well as capture opportunities within uncharted territories to support and accelerate the transition towards a sustainable economy.

Over the course of his career,
he has particularly focused on:

• Driving win-win policies; assisting partners with identifying issues and defining objectives, as well as developing and implementing strategies and solutions that shape stakeholders’ agenda.
• Blending technical and regulatory knowledge, political acumen, and personal drive to elucidate complex information and deliver practical and actionable solutions to key decision-makers.
• Cultivating trust and building rapport to effectively motivate, inspire, and unify teams and partners; utilizing collaborative leadership style to direct, prioritize, and promote internal and external initiatives.

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Jean de Renesse
Partner, Brussels

Over the past 20 years, one thing clearly characterizes Jean’s career: audacious entrepreneurship in developing innovative concepts. He was among the pioneers of the Internet in Belgium in the mid-1990s. He worked on the development of successful digital companies such as DAD (today Digitas LBI), Best Of Internet (Digimedia), Brussels Silicon Forest (startup incubator) and Yezzz (local Ebay’s challenger). He then set up the ‘First Tuesday’ Network in Belgium in 1999, which rapidly became the first networking forum for startups on a worldwide level. With events organized for more than 5 years, it has had a decisive impact on the emergence of the ‘Internet Economy’ in Belgium. First Tuesday Brussels thus received the prestigious ‘Insead Innovator Prize 2000’. In 2006, when mobile phones were equipped with their very first cameras, with barely a few hundred pixels, Jean launched Cinepocket, one of the first international ‘Mobile Film Festivals’. It received several thousand pocket films from 50+ countries and has contributed to the emergence of dozens of young talents. Jean has held a number of other positions in parallel, notably as Chief Editor of a mobile magazine (Comm’In), launched with Orange Belgium. He was also New Media Manager at Paperview Group, the European leader of content-based marketing solutions for the print and digital press (‘produit plus’). In 2016, he joined the Barefoot startup studio for a mission to support several projects, including ‘Blügle’, a digital platform linking brands and influencers on social networks. Always open to ‘new ways of working’ (NWOW), he launched Spacious Agency in 2018, an ecosystem and workspace development consultancy (coworking, accelerator, incubator, etc.) with clients active in real estate, retail, clubs and associations. A true citizen and entrepreneur, he collaborates (is strongly engaged) on various societal projects such as ‘303030 City Climate Challenge’, ‘Mo-Urban Mobility Movement’, Vocatio and the ‘Plateforme For Education and Talent’.

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