Guerrilleras

Romy researched and supported translocal anti-mining struggles, built and ran online and offline educational programs for social entrepreneurs globally, and did applied human factors research in the oil industry. She had never worked in philanthropy and her research had made her critical of NGOs that weren’t connected to grassroots movements – two major ingredients for setting up Guerrilla together with Toni and Ivan. Romy is the mother of an energetic toddler and, despite 20 years of yoga practice, still can’t sit in meditation. Too perfectionist and self conscious to ever develop an artistic practice, curating salads and composing meals from whatever is in the fridge is Romy’s way of making art. Born in East Berlin she experienced some of the positives of the GDR as well as the hard come-down into capitalism after the fall of the wall. Romy often daydreams about what a deeply democratic communism 2.0 might look like and what role non-religious forms of spirituality might play in this new system.

Saminder is a London native, who’s found her feet in Berlin. Saminder joined the Guerrilla Foundation after a maternity leave that excited her to get back to the world of work and to get stuck into systemic change. She channels that excitement into building resistance and resilience with grassroots movements across Europe as Guerrilla’s grantmaking co-pilot.

Saminder loves reading, particularly for her Feminist Bookclub where she explores the classics as well as modern trailblazers. Alongside feminist literature, Saminder is engaged in decolonizing her own reading lists (and mind) by diving into writings that challenge the colonialist status quo. 

For lack of a more creative outlet, Saminder enjoys cooking (and eating) and sparking taste buds with different cuisines in the kitchen. She spends her down time indoctrinating her toddler, attempting to make him love early nineties hip-hop and watching football as much as she does. Sadly, it is not going too well.

Julia has always been invigorated by deep conversations, hence her choice of philosophy as her university major. However, connecting more and more back to the existential underpinnings of life, she is realising that fulfilment has to do with true connections to the body/self and others and that rationality in its pure form is a supremacist concept. Singing, emotional intelligence, community organising, pleasure activism, anti-racism, horses, justice, permaculture, community care, etymology, good food, sparkling things, plants and beat-sy music get her heart pumping. 

She used to facilitate and curate cultural and musical projects as the Goethe Talents, was tour managing indie bands and did project management for an NGO called Earthbeat Foundation, an organisation striving for major reform & more fair processes in gold mining. Today, she is humbled by her work with the awesome Guerrilla grantees. She enjoys to coach and support them in every form possible, while juggling her patchwork-y family situation in a different sphere and learning along the way lessons on life, love and struggle.

Ivan is a seasoned campaign designer, podcaster, media producer & events curator. Things that get his mojo going are dancing (raving), anime, long-distance cycling, politicising the erotic, hammocks, puns, cashews, zines, entheogens, free diving, Octavia Butler & Mark Fisher. He’s mega disillusioned by large NGOs, the large Foundations that resource them, and the vicious, virtue-signalling, charitable-industrial complex they breed. Despite mounting cynicism, he’s still excited about the transformational power of collective action, of brutal authenticity and good speculative fiction that dares to imagine. Currently running an artivist community house by the sea in rural Greece while focusing on Guerrilla comms work, queer storytelling projects, cognitive liberation & arts festival production.

After studying and researching global inequities, Isabel attempted to alleviate some of the impacts caused by systemic injustices by working as a social worker in a shelter for refugees in Berlin. Seeing growth and learning as an ever-evolving pursuit, Isabel strikes to discover and understand the outer as well as the inner worlds. Growing up in Southern Germany, she has lived and worked in many contexts, from Tanzania and Myanmar to Uganda and the Netherlands, and after years away, she found her home back in Germany, Berlin, where she’s been cosily living since two years with friends. Isabel loves to spend time in nature and to practice yoga and meditation. She tentatively paints for the fun of it and loves to read, inspired by authors like Albert Camus, Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau and Chaim Potok.

Teresa is an experienced project caretaker, events organiser & curator, a story-smeller, and a systems change aficcionada. She is Guerrilla’s communications co-pilot and the editor of the storytelling portal The Radicals. She helps build the collective muscle of municipalism with the EMN and is a chumrade of its feminisation of politics collective. She digs food culture and provocative (political) art, likes to get baked while listening to Chet Baker and reading Rebecca Solnit. At large because of systemic conditioning, Teresa is sometimes haunted by her and our apparent lack of creativity. She finds soothing to experiment with radical imagination to imbue a new culture for the self and the many. She identifies as a she that is home to a we, referring to the multitudes of emotional layers that reveal her selves. She’s enchanted by the airs and tastes of the sun, particularly those of her homeland, Portugal.

Formally educated as a peace and conflict researcher and disillusioned by the exhausting treadmill of scholarships and renowned education programs she went through in Bordeaux, Moscow, Antananarivo or Bethlehem, Ricarda spent most of her salaried work in refugee support projects.

On the side she has been doing radical activism for 15 years, her longest contribution being to the Interventionistische Linke. Throughout this time she’s also worked with perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence and supported administratively the Transnational Social Strike Platform. More recently Ricarda’s focus shifted to doing more theoretical works when she published her first article on class and emotion. It is now time to merge the passions of grassroots radical activism and grantmaking work by joining the Guerrilla Foundation.

Ricarda’s side quests are learning all world languages to be able to communicate with (almost) all people on this planet, and working on her first pull-up to one day become an aerial acrobat. Questioning everything and explaining things in too much detail is her love language. You can get her interested in almost any topic, from postcolonial literature or sheep shearing to quantum physics, except for football (but she hasn’t told this to Saminder yet).

Anna studied and with eagerness learned from inspiring individuals around her, in the humble pursuit of contributing with system change approaches to social and climate justice. Starting with environmental sciences studies, and researching an intercultural community garden, she then continued her changing-making work with Social and Cultural Anthropology, where she focussed on transformation processes and a community housing project, among other things.

She was appointed curator of the anstiftung in 2018, where she gets to learn more about and from collaborative initiatives, dedicated individuals and a fantastic and passionate team. Lately she has been working in environmental education and project development.

She loves to prepare food to bring people together, is immensely grateful for the different ways in which Yoga impacted the lives of overly cognitive beings like herself, and always has a pair of socks in the drawer waiting to be knit.

Julie studied medicine and health economics at Heidelberg University, with a diploma in tropical medicine from the Tropical Institute in Hamburg & working towards a doctorate on malaria vaccine research, at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital’s Medical Research Unit in Lambaréné, Gabon. The impact investing world grabs most of her attention, therefore Julie spends most of her time hunting down impact investments across all asset classes for foundations and private investors who wish to invest their money in a sustainable way.

Steph comes with several languages, a masters degree in International Relations as well as a research & journalism background. Testing her wings she first worked in Nepal, to then hike throughout South America and eventually get stuck in Romania. There she organised grassroots action against destructive proposals & coordinated the ‘Save Rosia Montana!’ campaign which brought to life unparalleled citizen engagement in a post-communist Romania. For her contributions she was awarded the ‘Goldman Environmental Prize‘ in 2005.  Testing citizen engagement at a transnational level, she then worked on EU-wide campaigns such as the latest reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and later managed Stop TTIP/CETA European Citizens Initiative. Stephanie now is the European coordinator for the Open Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN).

Dan Christian Ghattas is an intersex activist, university lecturer and author who co-founded OII Europe in 2012 and is now the executive director. In 2013, he authored Human Rights between the Sexes, a first comparative international analysis of the human rights situation of intersex people. Earlier, in 2012, he co-authored a first study into the lives of trans people in Germany, entitled Studie zur Lebenssituation von Transsexuellen in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Dan has participated in all four International Intersex Forums, and helped to initiate the first forum.