Guerrilleras

Isabell keeps the behind-the-scenes engine steady, spanning admin, operations and finance with calm, low-drama competence. She’s a wide-ranging generalist who likes things to work: clear systems, reliable routines, and simple solutions that help people focus on what matters. Always in it for the long game, quality over quantity, and long-term relationships with people, projects, and the structures that hold them.

With Swabian roots and Bremen as her chosen home, she’s especially inspired by people who throw themselves wholeheartedly into something bold and has a steady hand for making sure the back office never becomes the reason those ideas can’t happen. Off the clock, she’s a family person, a dog companion, mountain-misser and a hands-on, make-it-from-scratch kind of person, preferably with a coffee present and fresh air involved.

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.

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.

Mét is a class privileged social worker, anarchist and a parent of a 9 year old. They got politicised in their late teenage years when their family gained a large and sudden amount of wealth, something that fundamentally made them reckon with the privilege that comes with this surge of economic and social capital. They smooth the tensions they feel around our unjust, rigged systems by singing over organ soundscapes, cycling hilly landscapes, sitting in meditation and hanging with their chosen family. Besides their work at Guerrilla, Mét also lives and co-runs an eco-community building project in Switzerland that challenges capitalist notions of homesteading. What fuels them in radical funding work is the firm belief in the transformative power of social and spiritual connectedness – healing that gets revealed when doing community caretaking via transforming affluence into abundance.

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 ninja.

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.

Teresa is an experienced project caretaker, events 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 at the EMN – particularly through her indispensable work with the feminisation of politics collective. She digs food culture and subversive art, likes to get baked while listening to Chet Baker and reading Sara Ahmed. At large because of systemic conditioning, Teresa is sometimes haunted by her and our apparent lack of creativity to think that ‘another way is possible’. She finds soothing to experiment with radical imagination, shifting the focus to process rather than result. She identifies as a she that is home to a we, referring to the multitudes of emotional layers that reveal her selves. She lives in Berlin but is physiologically and emotionally dependent on the southern light, which is why she regularly returns to her homeland, Portugal.

W’qaas is an impatient advocate of racial and migrant justice, which isn’t totally surprising for someone born in Punjab, Pakistan – a region split into two different nation states following the fall of British colonisation of the subcontinent. While born in Pakistan, W’qaas’ parents migrated to Belgium and they grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. This is why border policy politics and human rights injustices are topics that run deep for W’qaas, making these their expertise areas. After some years in Brussels and London, they call Berlin home since January 2019. 

W’qaas believes that to achieve systems change, we need to embrace and deeply commit to radical change. Philanthropy is a by-product of the crony capitalist system we live under with the aggravated pretention of “doing good to counterbalance the extractivist and unjust logic of profit” – a narrative that they believe absolutely needs to be shed. Dismantling what allows philanthropy to exist is the ultimate social justice goal, but until we can actually abolish capitalism and philanthropy in its totality, modelling participatory grantmaking is the only way forward in the field.

Other things that excite W’qaas are spending quality time with their chosen family, astrology, food (with a preference for spicier cuisines), movement – currently mostly yoga, spinning, hiking and dancing (at queer raves or their living room) and karaoke.

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.

Julie Engelhorn 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.

Stephanie Roth 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).