Activist, researcher, journalist, emergent dialogue practitioner, and transformative educator, Elizabeth Debold, Ed.D., calls herself a “gender futurist,” for her lifelong interest in our core identities and the unfolding of culture. Her New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Mother Daughter Revolution, was based on groundbreaking research conducted with Dr. Carol Gilligan at Harvard University. For the past decade, she has been an editor of evolve Magazin, a German-language quarterly, where she writes feature articles on gender. Elizabeth has been sought as an expert commentator by major media outlets in the U.S. and abroad (including NPR, Good Morning America, and Oprah). She served as Academic Director of the Master of Arts program in Conscious Evolution at The Graduate Institute, and has taught at Harvard University and the New School for Social Research. For over thirty years, she has been engaged in discovering and exploring the potentials of collective emergence. With her partner, Dr. Thomas Steininger, she has developed a dialogical process of “Emergent Interbeing,” that enables us to co-consciously engage with differences to create unexpected synergies. Through the platform of evolve World, she, Thomas, and their team of practitioners seek, in some small but meaningful way, to catalyze islands of coherence in a fragmented world. Through events such as the 24-hour online vigil One World Bearing Witness, she is helping to bring sacred activism into the global digital age. She lives in Frankfurt, Germany, and is working on a book about interbeing and emergence.

Mike Kauschke is the senior editor of evolve Magazin, an author, and a freelance translator with a focus on books with spiritual and integral themes, including works by Steve McIntosh, Frederic Laloux, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Rick Hanson, and Richard Rohr. He practiced and studied Zen Buddhism with teachers in Germany and the United States and worked in hospice care. For over ten years he has been involved in the practice and development of an evolutionary spirituality and is a dialogue facilitator for the emergent dialogue.

Maria Zacherl has been leading our annual international meditation marathon for many years. Her great passion is meditation and emergent dialogues, which she regularly practices as a dialogue facilitator. In both, meditation and dialogue, she experiences the potential for concrete change. For her, the development of humanity is the top priority, as a direct result of the transformative power of meditation and the experience of non-separation in dialogue. In her everyday life, this is also particularly noticeable in her work as a naturopath. In this deeper and transformed togetherness, a completely new basis for treatment emerges, and thus for her, spiritual practice never stops outside of meditation and dialogue times.