Smruti Patel

Founder and Co-Director

Smruti is the founder of Global Mentoring Initiative (GMI). She has management experience in the business sector and has been working in and on humanitarian action since 1995. She was a member of the Tsunami Evaluation team for Multi-Agency Thematic Evaluation: Impact of the international response on local and national capacities, and since then has been an active advocate for locally led response and accountability to affected population. She was the Head of Membership Services and Certification at HAP International (now CHS Alliance).

In 2015, she played an instrumental role in getting the idea of the network (NEAR) from paper to the launch of the network at the World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016. She is now actively involved in advocating for the change to more locally led response. She is a member of Charter4Change coordination group and a member of the International Convening Committee of Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP),a network of local and national organisations.

She is involved in co-creating spaces to accompany international organisations and donors in the change processes for better partnering and collaborations, focusing on shifting power, attitudes and behaviours; keeping equity, inclusion, anti-racism and decolonisation at the centre of the discussions. She was involved in the research to develop localisation framework for the Start Network, to assess and measure their progress towards localisation. The “Seven Dimensions Framework” is now being used and has adapted by many organisations and Humanitarian Countries Teams.

She has a Mental Health First Aider certificate, and is a certified coach for Human Potential tools. She coaches organisational leaders, individuals and teams to achieve their full potential. She is a coach on the springboard with She Leads Change. She is a Fellow with the Interagency Research and Analysis Network (IARAN). She is on the Board of Trustees of INTRAC.

Koenraad Van Brabant

Co-Director and Principal Consultant for our Sub-Division ‘Navigation 360’

Koenraad brings extensive programmatic and organisational management experience, drawing on 30+ years of work in and on volatile environments, where humanitarian action, violence reduction, peace work & governance improvements take place.

He has dealt with situations of rapid growth and rapid scaling down, and periods of organisational restructuring, decentralisation or re-centralisation. This includes situations of financial and trust crises and recovery therefrom. He has been part of or facilitated many strategic analysis and planning exercises.

For years he was co-director of a ‘Leadership’ training course.  He has also led the development of an innovative course on ‘Effective Advising’, covering the complementary skills that thematic experts need: interpersonal and cross-cultural skills, understanding the functioning of organisations in a wider socio-political and economic context, organisational capacity-strengthening, and change management.

He has often been focal point for or informal driver of collaborative work within organisations across units and silos, and between organisations in coordination platforms, networks, coalitions and partnerships, or less formalised multi-stakeholder processes.

He has a strong ability to ‘zoom in & zoom out’: seeing the relevant detail, while maintaining a holistic perspective on the organisation and seeing it within a wider, evolving, landscape.

He uses a diversity of techniques and approaches from facilitation, coaching, partnership brokering, systems and complexity thinking, adult learning, organisational development & change management, to enable inclusion, participation, trust building and convergence towards agreement, underpinned by critical thinking and results-orientation.

He is a trained Organisational and Relationships Systems Coach, a certified Partnership Broker; a former Chair of the Project Assessment Commission (international actions) of the Swiss Solidarity Foundation, and a member of its NGO Accreditation Commission; he has also been a Research Associate of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peace at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and a Fellow with the Interagency Research and Analysis Network (IARAN) in Paris.

His causes are inner development, conscious leadership, responsible followership, active citizenship, healthy relationships and good stewardship. His motto: “always act with care”.

In recent years, we have had the pleasure to work with several consultants and colleagues from the so-called ‘global South’, who we want to appreciate explicitly: Chasan Ascholani (Indonesia); Sai Syn Hwan (Myanmar); Qadeer Baig (Pakistan); Eddy Byanumgu Lwaboshi (D. R. Congo); Hadeel Qatamin (Jordan); Gloria Miranda Ángel (Colombia); Rana Haddad (Lebanon); Gervin Chanase (Ghana); Fatima Imam (Nigeria); Nanette Antequisa (Philippines); Samar Muhareb (Jordan); Naimo Ayot Oyaro (Uganda)

We also deeply appreciate the collaborations with Patrick Hoverstadt and Louise Le Gat