Helping you to use systems thinking to improve the climate resilience of places

Championing a practical and holistic approach to systems change

A networked organisation across industries, sectors and communities

Developing tools and frameworks to support planning and investment decisions that can deliver positive regional transformations

Working with city regions to learn, develop and share knowledge

Our vision

Enabling resilient communities to provide a better future for generations

Our mission

Helping you to use systems thinking to improve the climate resilience of places

Who we are and how we work

Because business as usual is no longer an attractive option

We are courageous, unafraid to challenge the status quo; collaborative, mutually reinforcing in all of our relationships; and ingenious, always working to make complexity more understandable and generate positive actions.

We aim to be effortlessly effective. We are a 4-day a week employer allowing everyone in the organisation time for wellness and mental health, when people bring their best selves and highest levels of creativity to do the best work of their careers and have fun doing it.

We embrace life long learning and curiosity, self reflection and critical thinking.

We can only do our work with humility, being honest and respectful with each other and the communities we work alongside, and we are completely committed to diversity.

As a networked organisation, we believe we work better than traditional organisations. We communicate well, rely on trust and integrity, as well as shared leadership, responsibilities and objectives, and always foster positive, beneficial interactions.

Like what you hear? Interested in working for us? From time to time we advertise jobs and internships. To work with us and for speculative enquiries, email us at team@resiliencebrokers.org

The team

Our growing team operates within a governance structure of world-leading expertise. Together, we foster a collaborative, emergent and inclusive working environment to balance global reach with leading-edge practice.

We are used to rapidly deploying expertise and resources to address city-region challenges around the globe and deliver positive outcomes.

We always collaborate and innovate to empower the Resilience Brokers Network to deliver our shared vision. Our preferred legal approach is alliance contracting, which ensures there is collective ownership of projects. 

Management Team

Andre Head

Andre Head

Chief Design Officer

Alastair Kennedy

Alastair Kennedy

Finance Director

Peter Head

Peter Head

Non-Executive Chair

Jeroen Brink

Jeroen Brink

Associate

Louisa Harris

Louisa Harris

Change specialist

Lubaina Mirza

Lubaina Mirza

Urban Designer

Andrew Simmons

Andrew Simmons

Director of Urban Innovation and Strategic Partnerships

Philipp Ulbrich

Philipp Ulbrich

Development Researcher

How it began

Peter Head

In 2004, after 34 years of my professional career as a civil engineer, I joined ARUP as their Global Planning Division lead. I moved from delivering major infrastructure projects to evolving ways to plan city-region systems, thinking I would be in a better position to influence change at scale.

I went on to lead a long list of sustainable development projects, including eco-cities in China. But time and again, I felt we were falling short of delivering the impact we could achieve because we could not demonstrate long-term economic benefit.

I kept quizzing world-leading experts, at events and conferences, on the reasons why nobody seemed to be addressing existing challenges and coming up with a sound plan, capable of delivering more inclusive resilient solutions at the systems level. Until one day at a conference in Hong Kong, when I had asked this again, someone in the audience said:

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Why don’t you do something about it, Mr. Head?

It then became clear to me that the urgent transformational change required wasn’t the responsibility of a single nation or organisation. It wasn’t going to be achieved through the conventional siloed approaches. It needed new institutions for collaborative mobilisation. Shortly after, I left ARUP to embark on an extraordinary journey. I set up the Ecological Sequestration Trust, a UK-based charity, to work alongside world-leading experts and organisations, to identify effective ways to deliver change at a speed and scale required. We have since come a long way, including assembling a great team of Resilience Brokers who are now deplyoing demonstrations of the transition to sustainable, inclusive development paths in city regions, globally.

We continue to grow and work with the Resilience Brokers Network to build on the strengths of city regions, including young leaders, to improve ecological and human health, and infrastructure productivity, to steer towards the Global Goals and beyond. Together, we can mobilise billions of people and unlock and redirect trillions in investment and finance into city-regions to build a better future for generations to come. A future built on equal opportunity, justice, dignity and shared prosperity for all.

 

Photo by Daniel Tong on Unsplash