Ellen Sprenger, CEO & Founder, Spring Strategies is a strategist and advocate for social and climate justice, working with over 200 organizations worldwide and sees leadership as being intentional about leaving a space better than you found it. Ellen is a curious optimist who truly believes in, and models, our capacity to create change when we work together, collaboratively.

Listen in while they talk about:

• How the evolution of Ellen’s work and contribution has transformed her approach to social justice from doing the right thing, having the right point of view, and convincing others to discerning what’s right in the moment, in service of something bigger, where things can be discovered together.
  
• The ways in which when drawing on and working with collective intelligence, there’s more joy and there’s more ease.
  
• How money flows is a huge problem. We run economies with the idea we can do this without any consequences. There’s a need for collective leadership and to think about the economy in global terms. If we can all get smarter and more intentional around financial innovation and resilience of the work, we can create a situation where there’s justice and there’s planetary health.
  
• Seeing Covid as an opportunity. By seeing, feeling and experiencing how interconnected we are, there’s potential for this to lead to some bigger shifts in our thinking, while having an impact on some of the other challenges that are happening and intersecting with the pandemic.
  
• Unravelling the strong cultural currents in a lot of organizations and teams that prioritize the outcomes without consciously + actively attending to the culture, resulting in tremendous amounts of anxiety and pressure.
  
• Meeting the challenge of creating workplaces where we can connect and feel healthy and thrive.
  How can we do that well and listen deeply to both the individual needs and the needs of a team, acknowledging the whole person and the whole team?
  
• How do each of us measure to determine what is enough? We see an opportunity and always want to do more. Should we conclude that we have too much on our plates? How do you calibrate when there’s more work to do?
  
• Leadership as a way of being in life, quiet leadership, connected leadership, community and conversation and thinking more collaboratively. Moving from seeing ourselves as individuals to interconnected beings in relationship with each other and life itself.
  
• The power of being intentional about surrounding yourself with incredible people, where everybody is growing constantly, holding common values and where everyone is in development.

Referenced in this Episode:

Spring Video: What is Fire
Philosopher: Yuval Noah Harari
Book: Human kind, a Hopeful History – by Rutger Bregman

More from Ellen:

New Blog:
Driving Change Through our Screens: Five Stages for Thriving in Virtual Space
Access this article here.

About Ellen:

Ellen Sprenger is a strategist and advocate for social and climate justice. Since 2004, she has been the founder and CEO of Spring. She is a believer — especially in human potential and our collective ability to solve the problems of our time. She is a curious and creative optimist, an espresso enthusiast and avid meditator. Her areas of expertise include multi-actor conference facilitation, future-scenario development, financial innovation and resilience for justice organizations globally, and executive coaching. Previously she held several management positions at Oxfam-Novib and was the Executive Director of Mama Cash, a feminist foundation based in Amsterdam. Ellen holds a masters degree in Development Studies, an MBA from Erasmus University, and she is an Integral Master Coach™ and Certified Integral Facilitator™. She is a member of the Board of 350.org, a movement working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all. Ellen is from the Netherlands and Canada, and has lived in Tanzania, South Africa and the United States. She currently lives in Toronto.

Find Ellen here:

Website: https://www.springstrategies.org/
Instagram: @ellen_sprenger @springstrat
Twitter: @ellensprenger @Springstrat
FB Page: @ellen.sprenger @Springstrategies1
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spring-strategies/