Sofia Bustamante - Turn Up the Courage / Melanin Partnership: Creating healthy communites at all levels of society through systemic and indivual transformation, where she helps individuals and organisations in four areas: Know your World, Know your Role, Move quickly in flow, Engage and Collaborate.

Sofia Bustamante, Turn up the Courage, is a community builder and social technology innovator and a process work practitioner. Overall, she is a social entrepreneur or rather sustainopreneur!

As a social technology innovator, she pioneers techniques in online collaboration, with a particular emphasis on bridging the online/offline divide. She pioneers techniques in online collaboration such as the Confluence model and her range of holistic peer development workshop designs such as The Applied U-Process and Evolution Lounge.

As a community builder: Since September 2007, Sofia is co-founder of The Melanin Partnership, a think-do tank addressing the societal need to strengthen the ever more fragile sense of community through constant participatory-led innovation and a core holistic practice. A key part of the work is supporting young people to have access to progressive models within the business world so that their ideas and dreams can be channeled into sustainable enterprises. The intention is that these young people’s initiatives become a force for changing the society in which they live, through their innovation and courage to challenge the old models and integrate the best of the new. The support is necessarily holistic, addressing personal, group and contextual challenges along their paths. Sustainopreneurship needs to be at the heart of this.

As a process work practitioner she facilitates real-time events with small and large groups, designing the appropriate processes to achieved the desired outcomes. A recent example of her work was to bring together stakeholders within the global banana industry for 1.5 days, to support them in putting together a multi-stakeholder forum in which dialogues and practical challenges can be addressed.

As a sustainopreneur she is kept alive and re-believing in her work by the diverse set of peers – ever increasing – that are taking steps to ‘create the world we want’ – stretching their minds and hearts beyond the outdated models such as ‘either charity or for profit’ business models and ‘either family or career’ outdated choices.

Lastly, she is able to turn up the courage herself, thanks to the strong hearted support of her peers and social support networks.

Other clients include Be The Change, Amnesty International, UNIDO, Changemakers, Common Purpose, AIESEC, Think tank 30 Club of Rome