Immersion Day 2023

Shazia Islamshah is a Senior Advisor at cinfo. She has over 20 years of experience in the human rights, humanitarian and philanthropic fields, in both leadership and thematic technical roles with various UN agencies, the ICRC, women's and children's rights NGOs and foundations. She has lived and worked at national, regional and international levels, including in fragile contexts in South East Asia, Central, West, East and Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Western Europe. Shazia is passionate about cultivating a whole systems approach that promotes agency and regenerative practices in collaboration and leadership. She is a member of Re-Alliance, which promotes a regenerative vision for the sector.

Onyango Otuoma is the co-founder and Managing Director of Mindful African Initiative, a non-profit organisation founded on a passion to address social and behavioural challenges related to mental wellbeing. He has over a decade of professional experience implementing and facilitating self-development programmes in his community and beyond. Onyango is a facilitator of CIT (Compassionate Integrity Training), SEE (Social Emotional & Ethical Learning) and CBCT (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training). Onyango is an active advocate for a more inclusive society.

Smruti Patel is the founder and co-director of the Global Mentoring Initiative. She has worked in the humanitarian and development sector for 25 years. She was a member of the Tsunami Evaluation Team for the Multi-Agency Thematic Evaluation: Impact of the International Response on Local and National Capacities, and has since been an active advocate for locally led responses and accountability to affected populations, including at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. She was the Head of Membership Services and Certification at HAP International (now CHS Alliance) and currently accompanies organisations on accountability and PSEA.

She is involved in co-creating spaces to accompany international organisations and donors in change processes for better partnership and collaboration, focusing on shifting power, attitudes and behaviours, keeping equity, inclusion, anti-racism and decolonisation at the centre of discussions.  She is a member of the International Convening Committee of the Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP), a network of local and national organisations committed to locally led action. She acts as a sounding board and provides mentoring support to local women leaders to enable them to play an effective role in high-level international policy forums. She sits on the Board of Trustees of INTRAC.

Trained as a social anthropologist, Koenraad Van Brabant's professional engagement over the last 30 years has been in crisis situations, mostly caused by violence rather than natural disasters. The main entry points have been humanitarian action and violence and conflict reduction, always with a deep interest in the specificities of the context and a longer-term perspective. He can and has played a variety of roles: strategic analysis and scenario planning, programme and project management, trainer and learning facilitator, event and process facilitator, review and evaluation, team coaching, partnership broker, advisor, mentor and coach. Koenraad remains a practitioner at heart, working with and for practitioners. He is currently co-director of Global Mentoring Initiative and principal consultant of its Navigation360 division.

Pru Waldorf is a non-profit founder, trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness teacher, and Compassionate Integrity Training (CIT) trainer. She holds a Masters in Applied Anthropology and Community Development and has been designing and co-ordinating projects in International and Community Development contexts for more than a decade. Pru is passionate about imbedding equity and tapping into the knowledge, capacity and resilience that exists within local communities and grassroots networks. She is excited by the potential of the CIT curriculum to bring collective healing and transformation.