Jayne Engle is an urbanist, strategist and adjunct professor, and co-authored the book Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities. She is co-lead with Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook of 7GenCities, a new collaborative for future-fit city building and Earth stewardship and is mission co-holder of Dark Matter Labs.

Jayne previously led the Cities portfolio at the McConnell Foundation and earlier worked in diverse contexts–from economic transition in Eastern Europe; to post-disaster community research in Haiti; to civic change work in Canada, the US and across Europe. She’s passionate about futures of cities, philanthropy and institutions and committed to decolonizing systems and opening possibilities for what that means. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning, Policy & Design from McGill University, is a Positive Deviant with Wolf Willow Institute, and is a Future Fellow with the Future of Canada Project of McMaster University. 

Positionality: I’m a descendant of settlers from Europe born on traditional unceded homelands of the Susquehannock Peoples and currently live on the island of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Frequent experience living and interacting with people seeking refuge from conflict zones and crisis home environments shaped my worldview and life pathways and contribute to a commitment to system transformations for the long term that are radically inclusive and extend beyond borders.

@jayneengle

linkedin.com/in/jayneengle

Thomas Granofsky is a social policy researcher, author, and consultant. He has authored publications on long-term care, childcare, poverty reduction, social assistance, fiscal federalism, and renewing Canada’s social safety net.

He is the founder of Rådhus Consulting, which specializes in delivering value-driven research, engagement, and advisory services. Thomas is also a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, teaching Social Policy and Social Welfare in the Canadian Context to MSW students. 

He previously held positions in several Ontario government ministries and the Mowat Centre, a public policy think-tank at the University of Toronto. He holds an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford and a BSW from Toronto Metropolitan University. 

@granofsky

Julius Lindsay is a leader in the environmental field with 15 years of experience in the areas of sustainability, climate change, and leading policy and strategy development and implementation.

He is the Director of Sustainable Communities at the David Suzuki Foundation. He leads the Foundation’s work to accelerate and raise the ambition of climate action in cities across the place now known as Canada. He is also a co-founder of the Black Environmentalist Alliance, an organization that seeks to champion Black people in the environmental profession, provide a safe space for peer-to-peer engagement to have real conversations and share experiences, and to advocate for environmental justice for Black Canadians now and in the future.

Prior to these two roles, Julius has been the catalyst for and led the development of climate change plans, programs, and policies at two of the biggest cities, Mississauga and Richmond Hill, in Ontario, Canada’s Largest Province. Julius is also a 2022 Next generation Foresight Practitioner Fellow and received their Inaugural Existential Risk award to support the Prismatic project as well.

linkedin.com/in/julius-lindsay-he-him-787ba820/

Samantha is an accomplished academic, published researcher, and foresight strategist.

Sam carries both Métis and mixed settler ancestry. On her Métis side, Sam is of the Ross, Collins, Grant and Ouellette families who have roots in the Meadow Lake region of Saskatchewan. Her settler family came to what is currently known as Alberta from Scotland and England three generations ago.

She is one of the Founding Directors of Future Ancestors Services and a Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellow. Drawing on her experience from both the public and non-profit sectors, Sam’s futures work explores possible futures through the lens of Indigenous futurism, ancestry, and equity.

In 2014 Sam received the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for her work exploring the Indigenous histories and traditional ecological knowledge of the Beaver Hills, Alberta. In 2020 her graduate research which explored the use of strategic foresight practices within Métis communities won the Association of Professional Futurists Student Recognition Award and OCAD University’s Presidential Medal.

@matterssamantha

Samantha Matters

@samanthamatters

Michael Morden is the Director of the Legislative Research branch of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, where he works with an interdisciplinary team of researchers who produce confidential, non-partisan research for parliamentarians.

Previously, Michael was the Research Director and interim Executive Director of the Samara Centre for Democracy, a non-profit democracy think tank that worked to strengthen civic leadership, democratic institutions, and public participation. Michael has held policy and research roles within government and with several think tanks in civil society. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Western University.

@mordenm

Dr. Madeleine Orr (she/her) is researcher, educator, and advocate working at the intersection of sport and climate change. After earning her PhD in Kinesiology from the University of Minnesota in 2020 and completing a postdoc in strategy at the University of British Columbia the following year, Orr joined the Institute for Sport Business at Loughborough University London where she developed the world’s first MSc in Sustainable Sport Business.

Orr is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, an international consortium of academics who drive climate action in the sport sector through research and public education initiatives. Her research in sport ecology examines the impacts of climate change on the sport sector, with a focus on resilience and adaptation.

She has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and several industry-facing reports that gained global attention. Her work has been covered by the BBC, Time Magazine, ESPN, Sky Sports, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and more. She is currently writing her first pop science trade book Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports (for Bloomsbury, publishing in 2024). Her work driving positive change in sport has been recognized by Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in Sports, Corporate Knights Magazine’s 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders, and NAAEE’s 30 Under 30 Environmental Educators. She was the 2022 recipient of the Rising Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota.

Nick Vlahos is the Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League, working to improve official public meetings, mapping the American healthy democracy ecosystem, researching local civic leadership, and bringing together parliamentarians for an exchange on global innovations in democracy.

Nick is passionate about citizen empowerment and collaborative public service provisioning in contexts of inequality. He resides in Toronto and holds a PhD in political science from York University.

In 2020, Nick published a book entitled The Political Economy of Devolution in Britain from the Postwar Era to Brexit. He also writes about how public participation and deliberation can elevate social well-being, mobilize problem-solving strategies facing local areas and (re)build better connections to elected officials and formal political institutions.

Previously, Nick was a fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, at the University of Australia leading an international research and civic engagement initiative called Connecting to Parliament. He is a member of the Democracy R&D network and the participatory governance cluster of Participedia. Nick also worked on the ground in Alexandra Park, a social housing revitalization neighbourhood in the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, leading tenant engagement, including participatory budgeting concerning capital infrastructure. In addition, Nick was part of the first Bloomberg Philanthropy innovation team in Canada, working on a project concerning civic engagement with underrepresented populations at the City of Toronto’s Civic Innovation Office.