Gavin Andersson grew up in Botswana. While studying towards a BSc degree in Johannesburg, he became active in re-starting the black South African trade union movement and was banned by the Apartheid Government in 1976. To earn a living, he grew vegetables then co-founded a woodworkers' cooperative. After five years under banning orders, he left South Africa for Botswana, where he became founder and coordinator of CORDE, strengthening cooperatives and founding several business enterprises.
He later formed an Organisational Development consultancy, working across southern Africa and in the Caribbean. Dr Andersson is a leading exponent of the Moraisean Organization Workshop (OW) and has adapted this methodology so that it now enables communities to tackle social and environmental issues alongside economic problems. Andersson has introduced the concept of Unbounded Organization to the field of organizational studies, (www.unboundedorganization.org)Gavin was co-creator of Kwanda, a reality TV show where teams from 5 communities drew on the insights gained from a Learning Camp based on the OW to bring about a 'community makeover', with the creation of enterprises and new patterns of activity.
Gavin was one of the pioneers of the Community Work Programme, which now provides regular and predictable work opportunities to over quarter of a million people across South Africa. In 2009 he co-founded the Seriti Institute (www.seriti.org.za) which strengthens community organisation for sustainable livelihoods and prosperity. He continues to be involved in social enterprise, currently forging trisectoral collaboration around agroecology, and enabling small farming enterprises to achieve economies of scale through cooperation.
Gavin is a member of council of Mining Dialogues 360? which convenes evidence-based dialogues about the mining industry and its impacts. He is Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Business at UCT.
Howard Richards (born June 10, 1938) is a philosopher of Social Science who works with the concepts of basic cultural structures and constitutive rules. He holds the title of Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana, the United States, the Quaker School where he taught for thirty years.
He retired from Earlham College, together with his wife Caroline Higgins in 2007, and became a Research Professor of Philosophy. He has a Ph. D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a Juris Doctor from the Stanford Law School, an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) from Oxford University (the UK) and a Ph. D. in Educational Planning from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada.
He now teaches at the University of Santiago, Chile, and has ongoing roles at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business program. He is founder of the Peace and Global Studies Program and co-founder of the Business and Nonprofit Management Program at Earlham.
