People

Ilma trained in Brazil as a nursing assistant and owned and ran a cleaning business. For the past 20 years she has been involved in community-building volunteer work in her home town of Framingham, Massachusetts. A long-standing member of the public school outreach and school development committees, Ilma also works on Framingham Town Hall anti- violence initiatives. Ilma recently directed the "Brazilian Women Helping Each Other Live Healthier," a cancer screening and community empowerment project for Brazilian immigrant women.

Most recently, Ilma earned the "Rising Star" award at the Center for Women's Enterprise in Boston for her work in founding "Handeira Linens and Lace," an international business that supports community development in northern Brazil among the indigenous Xukuru people. Ilma works in partnership with the Xukuru indigenous people marketing their fine handmade lace women's clothing and houseware to create a sustainable livelihood that also preserves their health, their land, and their cultural identity.

In addition to business development, Ilma has helped the Xukuru start several social initiatives in their community, including eye and vision exams for lacemakers, computer classes for teenagers, a farmer's seed bank, and a community-operated general store.

Manish Srivastava is a Systemic Change Consultant with expertise and passion for “coaching leaders and organizations towards seeking inner wholeness and co-creating a sustainable future”.

He brings more than 10 years of experience in organizational change and leadership development with Corporations (like Unilever, Marriott Hotels, Hasbro Inc, Coca-Cola etc), NGOs, Community and Government. His earlier assignments included: coaching top leaders from UNICEF, Unilever and Synergos Institute to evolve India’s pioneering multi-sectoral partnership to address complex societal problem of child malnutrition, and; leading large-scale learning and change project for 3500+ leaders across Unilever India and South Asia (that bagged the enterprise award).

Manish is a certified Organization Development (OD) and Change Catalyst (Level 5) from Indian Society for Applied Behavioral Sciences (ISABS). He holds Masters in Human Resource Management, Graduation in Sociology and Education and, international certificates in dialogue and facilitation.

Over the last 2 years he is based out of Boston area on a learning sabbatical that included a self-directed action-research with leading institutions (including PI, SoL, Harvard, MIT) focusing on Presencing, emerging leadership consciousness and sustainability. He has presented papers at Global OD Forums and delivered guest lectures at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad (IIMA), ISABS and Udai Pareek HR Labs in India.

Manish is currently engaged as a researcher, working with a team of dynamic social innovators at Presencing Institute and MIT CoLab on Transforming Capitalism project . He supports the team in: co-evolving online community platforms for transforming the collective consciousness towards a regenerative economy.

Tumber is the author of American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and co-editor with Walter Earl Fluker of A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religion and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). She has a doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Rochester, and has worked as an editor for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Review. Her essays and reviews have appeared in both publications as well as in Book Forum, the Washington Post, In These Times, and Commonweal.