Meet the fellows

In Namibia’s Kalahari Desert, among the Ju/’hoansi, Bettina Ludwig learned to read tracks in the sand. The Vienna-based cultural and social anthropologist treats tracking as a way of reading 300,000 years of human history, and what she found there is simple: we all need to feel we belong, and we all long for love.

Her research shows that our species survived far more through cooperation, curiosity and kinship than through competition, status and hierarchy. Real belonging, she says, is a place where we may be as we are without making anyone else small.

Today she is a sought-after keynote speaker across Austria, bringing lessons from the Kalahari to business leaders and audiences on belonging, optimism, leadership, and how artificial intelligence and Indigenous wisdom might become allies for the future. As an entrepreneur, she has chosen not to follow the classic playbook for scaling, sensing that compassion grows by different rules.

For more than a decade, Carol Xu, a Stanford PhD, studied work through the lens of academia: how organizations take shape, how technology is socially constructed, and what makes new ways of organizing possible. Yet the deepest shift came from a meditation class in Berkeley sixteen years ago, which opened up a whole new world within her.

Contemplative practice gave her a felt connection to life that understanding alone couldn’t reach. It also changed how she works with groups. “Start by trusting that everybody can lead,” she says. She has come to see bottlenecks not as personal failings but as structures that can be redesigned and power that can be shared.

Today she brings these threads together as a facilitator and steward. At Relational Dojo, a place of practice for relational skills, she hosts free gatherings such as Bohm Dialogue and T-Groups for people across the globe. Through the new Living Systems Research Initiative, she is exploring how permaculture, Indigenous wisdom and Buddhist insight might reshape organizations, and even AI.

During the pandemic, Doruk Kurt fell in love with a tree outside her window. For years she had barely noticed it, busy with life’s priorities. But when the world stopped, she watched its bare branches come alive and slowly began to see everything that made it possible: roots, soil, rain, birds, seasons. She named the tree Destiny. Through her, Doruk found herself falling in love with the whole of life, including herself.

With an MBA from Harvard Business School, Doruk spent years overachieving in the corporate world, always moving toward the next goal. Nature showed her that life moves less like a straight line and more like a spiral, through cycles of emergence, flourishing, letting go and beginning again. She eventually left corporate life and began her journey as a life coach, helping individuals, creators and conscious entrepreneurs align their inner values and unique gifts with how they live and build.

Underneath all Doruk does is a simple idea inspired by Destiny: beauty is unity within diversity, each of us becoming fully ourselves while remaining part of the whole.

For twenty-one years, Duong Quang Chau served at an NGO working alongside ethnic minority communities in Vietnam, learning, as it turned out, far more than he was teaching. When the time came to leave, he sat with a question that quietly undid him: Where did everything I have actually come from? The answer was not the organization. It was the communities and the land, the wisdom that had passed through him like water through soil.

A practitioner of permaculture, Chau had long understood that true abundance comes from working with nature, not against it. He went on to anchor the Vietnamese ripple of the One Straw Revolution, inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka’s radical teaching that less is often more. Through the One Straw Community, he has offered permaculture design courses as a gift, freely, without price, trusting that what was given freely to him deserves to flow freely onward.

At heart, Chau is a farmer who learned from the soil, and from the people closest to it.

Shaped early by Pune’s Jnana Prabodhini and its emphasis on social leadership, Gaurav Marathe, a professor at the prestigious IIM Ranchi, has turned his campus into a living laboratory of kindness. Weekly philosophical cafés. Storytelling evenings under the stars. Drum circles that have reached a juvenile home and city slums. A carnival where nothing carried a price tag, only an invitation to pay it forward. A Young Changemakers residential with more than 400 alumni. Each experiment asks the same question: What happens when we lead with trust rather than transaction?

Lately, the rise of AI has stirred deep questions in him. When he speaks of its potential, he often recalls a Hindi proverb that translates as: amid the ease with which a human becomes a demon, don’t forget the possibility of a human becoming divine. AI, he believes, stands at the same crossroads. Rather than watch from the sidelines, he wants to help gather the collective wisdom to guide it well.

Though a teacher, Gaurav remains a student, still experimenting with what a kinder society might look like.

As a child, Geetha Govindarajan saw people begging for food on the streets of her city. As a teenager, she watched her younger brother battle a terminal illness. As an adult, she learned how impermanent relationships and phases of life can be. In a world where everything kept changing, she went looking for something eternal. That search drew her inward, into what she calls a friendship with the Divine.

An internal medicine physician with an MD, PhD and MPH, Geetha has spent years caring for underserved neighborhoods in Chicago. Inspired by a Sai mobile clinic in rural India, she and a colleague joined a community food truck service, visiting people in their homes to bring preventive care to those who would otherwise have gone without.

Her compass has always been her Guru’s teaching: “Love all, serve all.” For Geetha, service is a privilege, and over time it has become her way of finding herself. Now she feels called to bring every part of herself together in service of raising the collective consciousness of our world.

When Leena Wilde Ryan delivered her grandmother’s eulogy, something in her stirred. Standing there, she saw it clearly for the first time: somewhere along the way, she had traded what made her feel alive for what made her feel safe.

That night, she wrote a letter to her future child, promising to find the girl she had lost. The letter became a quiet quest to heal and remember, and it led her to her daughter, Luna, and to motherhood as a sacred initiation. Yet feeling alone on that path, she became something of a soul anthropologist, gathering stories from mothers around the world. Each story was a gateway to listen more deeply and come home to who she truly was.

A storyteller with twenty years in media, Leena co-founded WishWell Village, an ecosystem for giving presence both online and in person, with her partner Scott. Through its free app, anyone can offer a friend or a stranger a minute of undivided presence for whatever they are carrying. Her inspiration comes from the potlatch, a gift-giving ceremony of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, where a leader’s worth lies not in what they keep, but in what they give away.

Maki Kawamura was six years old when she discovered that her birthday was also the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Something in her quietly opened that day: a recognition that true happiness cannot exist only for oneself.

She grew up to become a palliative care physician, a peace advocate, and the President of the Goi Peace Foundation, carrying forward a lineage devoted to the prayer May Peace Prevail on Earth. Sitting with dying patients taught her that some things cannot be fixed, only witnessed. And somewhere in that witnessing, a deeper question took root: How does the universe want me to serve?

That question has found expression in many forms. The one most alive today is the Youth Peace Ambassadors program she leads, where young people across cultures, borders and differences discover that peace is not an abstract ideal but something that can come alive in the space between us.

She holds all of this—the medicine, the prayer, the dying, the young—not just as a mission, but as an inner compass for her life.

Mehdi Aminian left Iran at sixteen. As he traveled through different countries and cultures, he returned to what had been planted in him as a seed: Persian poetry, Sufi philosophies, and especially the ney, an ancient reed flute.

Though he lives these passions as a musician, composer, filmmaker and researcher, the early separation quietly stirred deeper questions within him. What remains when identities fall away? What connects us beneath language and belief?

Through Roots Revival, his intercultural musical initiative, and years of working with carpet-weaving communities in Iran and displaced Afghan musicians, Mehdi began to discover that such questions are rarely answered in solitude. Sometimes it is another person, a shared silence, or an act of deep listening that reveals what explanation cannot.

Melinda Edwards grew up in a Mayan village in the highlands of Guatemala, where her parents served as medical missionaries. Early in life she felt an inner pull toward a deeper truth, a longing that carried her through meditation retreats, spiritual communities and travels to India. Her search eventually led her to Ram Dass, in whom she recognized what she had been seeking.

A Stanford-trained psychiatrist caring for underserved adults in Charleston, Melinda doesn’t experience her work as her own love, but as a river of Love flowing through her.

When her daughter, Saachi, was diagnosed with autism at sixteen months, that river took her in a new direction. Rather than trying to “fix” Saachi, she began to receive her as a teacher, and to see autistic people as carriers of a wisdom the world has yet to understand.

In 2017, a vision received in meditation became Living Darshan, a nonprofit that honors the wisdom of people on the autism spectrum through conferences, community gatherings and speaking engagements. Now she is preparing its next chapter: turning her own home into a residential and community space for autistic adults.

While volunteering at a health camp in Tajikistan, Roshan Sher Ali watched a parent refuse treatment for their young daughter’s life-threatening illness. The moment stayed with her. It left her asking about everything that shapes a family’s choices: poverty, culture, fear and belief. Rather than judge, she found herself wanting to understand.

A nephrologist at Elmhurst Hospital near Chicago, Roshan has spent more than two decades in medicine. Alongside her clinical work, she volunteers with migrant communities, where she has come to know both life’s unpredictability and the remarkable endurance of people who keep going, and keep striving to do better, against every obstacle.

Today she feels called to support immigrant women and survivors of domestic violence in building sustainable careers, so that hardship in one generation does not become poverty in the next.

At fifteen, Ruth Brigandi woke up without language, without a name, without any memory. For four months, she existed in a state of pure, undifferentiated presence: no thoughts, no emotions, no self. Modern medicine attributed it to inflammation in the pituitary gland. She simply describes it as a “peaceful stage.”

What followed was its own kind of journey: finding her way back into identity, into language, into life. That passage left something in her, a felt understanding that the self is not as solid as we imagine, and that our interconnectedness as beings carries its own wholeness.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that she found her way to Fundación Humanitas, where she has spent years building spaces where people can think more deeply about their shared interconnectedness and what it really means to live in peace and harmony with each other.

A renowned Toronto chiropractor for nearly thirty years, Scott Levine has treated top athletes and public figures. Yet his work has always felt closer to a sacred offering than a job: listening to the body, sensing what it has been quietly carrying, and releasing it through energy, intuition, the hum of a tuning fork, whatever the moment asks of him.

At a turning point in his life, Scott hit a car while riding his bike at high speed. In that stretched-out moment, one thing became clear: he needed to build an authentic life, not one shaped by ego, but one rooted in love. A month later, sitting in a silent room full of meditators, he felt something he never had meditating alone, as if everyone’s awareness belonged to one field. Walking out, he turned to a friend and asked, “Is there a way to use technology to keep us this connected when we’re apart?”

That question became WishWell Village. For nine years, Scott and his partner Leena have built it together: a free app where anyone can give someone a minute of undivided presence, and ZeroOne, a symbol of presence gifted more than 280,000 times around the world.

Urvi Gupta was born the same year as Goonj, the movement her parents, Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta, built to transform the culture of giving in India. Growing up between villages, small towns and cities, she never had to seek out service. It was simply her whole world.

Her own search, however, came as a slow burn. Working across global networks and grassroots organizations, she kept witnessing the same heartbreak: passionate people burning out, not for lack of purpose, but because the systems around them failed to hold them. She realized her calling was to serve those who serve, building the conditions for the coming era of social impact to be held in warmth, community and sustainable systems.

Trained as an elementary school teacher, Urvi learned early that, from toddlers to adults, we all simply want to be seen. Today she brings that same deep listening to a sector in generational transition, starting with a simple step: listening to her peers.