Alex Hannant
Avid learner. Motivated by doing things better and fairer.
Alex has extensive and varied experience in the fields of sustainability, social enterprise, and innovation. He is focused on bringing a systems lens to the design of governance, financing, organisational infrastructures, learning practices, and change processes.
Alex is a specialised generalist who revels in research and discovery, problem-solving, communicating ideas, and strengthening the capacities of groups and individuals. He serves on the Boards of B Lab Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and Social Enterprise Australia, and is a Fellow at The TransCap Initiative.
Previous roles include: Co-Director and Professor of Practice at The Griffith Centre of Systems Innovation (formerly The Yunus Centre) (AUS), CEO of the Ākina Foundation (NZ), Director of Programmes at LEAD International (UK), and Head of Partnerships at the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (UK).
Jody Connor
A magician behind the scenes of social impact.
Jody works with clients to ensure their enterprises are thriving on a solid basis of sensible and responsible administration. She ‘builds’ offices, sorts payroll, policies and insurance - all those things that can be hard to get your head round.
Deeply dextrous with an array of online tools, she has worked with social enterprises and government departments alike in a wide range of operational and systems architecture roles. Jody is also a ruthlessly accurate proofreader and wordsmith - she can spot an extra space or a misused apostrophe at 20 paces.
Jody is currently unavailable for contracts.
Hélène Malandain
Contributing hope, imagination and action to economic transformation.
Hélène is curious about models, innovative frameworks, and philosophies that can inform the redesign of our systems towards a new economy. She is committed to continuous learning, to growing her toolbox and her practice, and to expanding her horizons - and those of others’ through collaboration.
Hélène enjoys working across multiple scales: from global and multi cultural environments to local and place-based contexts. Her work spans all sectors of the economy, contributing to people’s vision for change across contexts, topics and opportunities. She thrives on such diversity.
Her current projects involve discovery and research, exploration and sense making, participative stakeholder engagements, strategy setting, narrative shifts and storytelling, capability building, and behaviour change methodologies.
Hélène has been serving as the Chair of the Board for the Social Enterprise World Forum since 2019. She has been instrumental in the shaping of ‘People and Planet First’, a global movement and global verification for enterprises that put people and planet first. She is also a Trustee of the Sustainability Trust.
Hannah Smith
Developing people, relationships, and systems for social change.
An Edmund Hillary Fellow and Associate with the Social Enterprise Academy, Innovation Unit and Toi Āria - she is a coach, learning designer, facilitator and systems thinker with a particular passion for working with people outdoors.
She has extensive experience working with enterprising charities, progressive foundations and leading social entrepreneurs - and a keen understanding of the whole spectrum of purpose-led work.
Undertaking Masters research into the practice of social entrepreneurship in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011, she encountered the rest of the Pocketknife whānau when she was hosted by the Hikurangi Foundation for a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2013. More of an ecologist than an entrepreneur - she focuses on fostering whole systems of change, within and around individual organisations. She is on the leadership rōpū for Adventure Therapy Aotearoa and recently launched The Connectorship Project.