Co-founder of Eurasia Association and Foundation. Manager, Lisi has been working and living with disabled children and youngsters for almost 30 years. She has worked as art-therapist, special teacher and has together with her husband and two children lived for 12 years with 7 disabled youngsters in a Camphill Community. Lisi is the director of Eurasia Foundation. She is living and working in Switzerland and Vietnam.

Tho and Lisi are grandparents of five grandchildren. Lisi is active in various peace movements like the Global Peace Initiative of Women. Lisi and Tho practice meditation and guide a meditation retreat every summer in the Swiss alps in Chandolin.

Founder of ELI: Eursasia Learning Institute for happiness and Wellbeing, Chairman of Eurasia Foundation.

He was the Program Director GNH Center Bhutan from 2012 to 2018.

As former Head of Training, Learning and Development at the International Committee of the Red Cross, he has trained humanitarian professionals working in war zones and emergency response in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

He is a visiting professor in adult education and humanitarian work in several Universities (UCL/Belgium, Geneva/Switzerland, Schumacher College /UK, Hue University / Vietnam.

He is a well-known international speaker on GNH, Happiness and Wellbeing and beyond GDP for education, business and communities.

Together with his beloved wife, Lisi, he is the co-founder of Eurasia Foundation, a humanitarian NGO developing educational programs for children and youths living with disabilities, as well as ecological projects in Vietnam for 20 years.

He is a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute/USA, and a member of the Presencing Institute/USA).

He wrote the Happy Schools in Vietnam Curriculum an innovative educational program introducing Mindfulness, Social and Emotional Learning and Care for the Planet in the Vietnamese education system.

He consults with companies wanting to implement Gross National Happiness principles in their organization, including B. Grimm /Thailand, Happy Mandala / China and BITIS / Vietnam.

He is the author of several books and many articles.

Phan To Trinh is a Vietnamese educator and a social pioneer in the field of special education and social therapy. After her university studies, she worked in tourism industry and in the field of development with an international NGO. But her passion was education and she became a teacher.

She was selected in the first group of teachers to undergo training in Special Education with Eurasia Foundation and became a pioneer in this field, creating the first classes of “responsible inclusion” for children with intellectual and emotional disabilities in Hue. She has been granted several national awards for her educational achievements. She works in Thuan Thanh School, one of Eurasia’s pilot projects in partnership with Hue City Education Department.

She was instrumental in creating the first intentional community in Vietnam in social therapy: the Peaceful Bamboo Family, inspired by the Camphill Movement and the Gross National Happiness development paradigm. She is currently the co-director of this community.

She is a very dynamic woman who supervises and advises our staff in many ways.

Tu is the director of the Peaceful Bamboo Family (Tinh Truc Gia – TTG). Tu went to Le Béal, a camphill community in France several times, working there with adults living with disabilities and connecting different members of the Camphill movement worldwide. 

He worked for two years at Long Tho Pagoda, Beloved School, with adults living with disabilities, opening the first jam workshop there. Together with Mr Minh Khanh Tran he supervised the construction of the Peaceful Bamboo Family. He now takes care of the wellbeing and daily management of the entire community. He is a member of the Eurasia and TTG direction boards.

Together with his very dynamic wife Mrs Trinh and their two lovely daughters he lives in Hue.

Khanh is the official Eurasia representative in Vietnam. He studied special education during four years, from 1998 to 2002 at Perceval Foundation, in St Prex, Switzerland. Since he came back to Vietnam in 2002, he has supervised a great number of Eurasia projects. He is active with training and following the educational staff in Hue.

He is in charge of an office of early detection and parental advice in Saigon. He completed his own training by following a course in early intervention in Geneva University Hospital.

Khanh is an ELI trainer and currently working on the Happy Schools project in Hue. He is also contributing to the Happy Organisations project in Vietnam. He lives with his wife and his lovely daughters in Saigon.

Hai Nguyen Phuoc is a Project Manager of Eurasia Foundation & Association. His work with Eurasia spans the fields of education, special education, social therapy, ecology, and Gross National Happiness - GNH. Eurasia Learning Institute for Happiness and Wellbeing (ELI) offers experiential programs leading participants from inner transformation to engagement for a happy and sustainable world.

Hai loves to connect people, and he helps Eurasia connect to many young people, NGOs in Vietnam and around the world to get in touch with the needs and aspirations of the younger generation.

Hai is Eurasia Learning Institute (ELI) representative leading the Happy Schools Project in Hue. Together with his team, ELI is developing a 3-year Happy Schools Project with Education Department of Hue Province. The program has grown from 6 schools and 130 teachers with a focus on “Care for self, Care for others and Care for Nature”, to now 9 Schools with 240 teachers.

Hai is also involved in a three-year process to bringing happiness and wellbeing to the company culture of Biti’s, one of the leading shoe manufacturers in Vietnam.

Marie Fleur studied social education and has worked with children and teenagers with special needs for ten years. Lately she has been working with refugees in cummunity gardens, finding a new direction in her professional life.

She has been working with Eurasia Association since 2015 and she is Eurasia association President. She is involved in organising fundraising events and organising and facilitating ELI events and retreats based on mindfulness and deep ecology. She loves to facilitate the Work that Reconnects by Joanna Macy.

She is currently living in a community called Le Petit Bochet in Switzerland with her two year old son, Gaël.

EDITH is senior advisor at ELI. She is also the co-director of the Certificate of Advanced Studies ( CAS) ” Happiness in organisations”, developped in partnership with ELI and the Geneva Management School.

Edith holds degrees in Public and International Law, Political Science and Humanitarian Action. She has a PhD in comparative public law. Since 2005, she was involved in training for Aid workers as training manager ( Bioforce; Eirene Suisse; Isango).  She joined the CERAH (University of Geneva-Graduate Institute) in 2010 as training coordinator and deputy director.

She conceptualized and was one of the leaders of the Humanitarian Encyclopedia Project

She has worked in fragile context and post-conflict areas for over sixteen years, in the field and at headquarters.

She is used to facilitating transformative processes (collectives and institutional) and coordinate collaborative and transdisciplinary projects. She specialized in community engagement, organisational change and participatory approaches.

Edith integrates the GNH approach in her teachings as well as in her way of life. She became in September 2016 the Swiss coordinator of the Gross National Happiness movement. She is member of the Eurasia Foundation Board since 2014.

Ursula Versteegen (PhD, M.P.H) is a co-founder of the Presencing Institute (M.I.T. Boston, USA), action researcher and practitioner of the social technology described as “Theory U” by C.O.Scharmer. She supports leaders in shaping social innovation and creating change processes throughout society in business, education, health care and organic agriculture by tapping into and shifting the quality of awareness in themselves and social fields. Ursula is also a co-founder of the Institute for Mindful Agriculture seeking to re-connect agriculture, food producers and consumers towards a regenerative AG-FOOD economy.  She is an a team member and trainer of Eurasia Learning Institute (ELI) facilitating social change towards new development paradigms such as GNH.

Jana has worked with children with special needs in Fondation Perceval, Switzerland for 7 years, from 2010-2017. She studied psychology in Ireland and has completed a training in social pedagogy in Switzerland. She joined the Eurasia team in 2016 and has facilitated ELI retreats based on deep ecology and mindfulness.

She was travelling for the last two years, taking time to learn from different cultures and to define how she will to engage in bring healing to our planet. From March-May 2018 she worked in the Peaceful Bamboo Family in Vietnam to set up a training program and provide some training in the fields of special education and artistic disciplines for the young team.

She is currently living in Le Petit Bochet farm and community with Marie-Fleur.

Arnaud is a social and emotional learning trainer, facilitator and mediator. His practice gives priority to the quality of the relationship between stakeholders to achieve desired and lasting results. He is also project manager for the Education4Peace Foundation which advocates integrating social and emotional learning into education for the future generations.

Arnaud is one the founders of the Gross National Happiness Movement in Switzerland, a think-tank to reflect about a more inclusive paradigm of development and act to make this change possible. He is the Vice-President of Eurasia Association.

Hung is the manager of the The Peaceful Bamboo Family garden, the first and currently only biodynamic garden in Vietnam, he is a pioneer in this field in Vietnam.

He was trained by Mr. Marc Blachere, an expert in biodynamic agriculture from Copake.

Hung is a member of the TTG direction board.

Nowadays, Hung and the garden team are very happy to open the garden to the public, organizing many courses to share his expertise and way of caring for Mother Earth with as many people as we can, also opening the garden to young children from Hue schools, teaching them about caring for the environment.

He lives in TTG together with his wife and his son.

Grown up close to her grandparents biodynamic farm, Jacoba already developed a love to the care of mother earth in her childhood.

In 2013 she joined programs on Theory U and GNH, volunteered in our TTG Community and started studying new economics in Germany. Since 2018 she became ELI learning Lab participant, next to doing her masters in ethics and organization.

Philippe’s career with a recognized international organization – Médecins Sans Frontières – has enabled him to acquire solid skills in the fields of Management, Human Resources and Learning & Development.

Today he practices as senior consultant and his best areas of expertise are Coaching, Mediation, Facilitation, Training and Audit in the field of organizational change management.

His university curriculum is made of two complementary European Master’s degrees. The first has been obtained at the Sorbonne University in Paris in the Department of Political Science, in the field of Strategic Project Management, and the second one at the University of Geneva, in Human Resources Management, whose thesis dealt specifically with the evolution of learning processes in organizations.

Philippe has then specialized with certifications in Corporate Coaching and Professional Mediation.

His career is made of four periods that feed on each other:

– He first worked as a Manager of humanitarian programmes in complex international environments for several years, in countries such as South Africa, Afghanistan, Tanzania, South Sudan, Liberia and some more…

– He then made a long-term and in-depth commitment to Human Resources where, after having held many managerial positions, he contributed to their development and professionalization. He headed the HR department of Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland for 3 years and joined the Executive Committee. The organization then had 1500 employees spread all over the world.

– Then he became involved with determination, for 13 years, in the creation of “Learning and Development [L&D]”. His investment and vision in talent development makes it a major and strategic institutional focus for Médecins Sans Frontières. The L&D cluster is thus recognized for the quality of its innovative learning systems.

He now devotes himself to individual and collective coaching and organizational transformation. He develops a holistic approach and innovative learning and transformation processes that enable reconnection to one self, to others and to the personal and professional environment. His practice, based on listening and caring, places people at the heart of his approach.

Katia (Ekaterina) Novikova is passionate about movement and the practice of full presence. An active member of the Eurasia association, Katia co-organizes and co-facilitates training and coaching aimed at individual and organizational transformations for better well-being. Having more than 8 years of experience in the private, para-public and non-profit organizations in the field of human resources, Katia believes that an environment oriented towards Happiness and well-being allows individuals to give the best of themselves and to contribute to the common success. Convinced of the need to develop a new paradigm, she has been a member of the Gross National Happiness (GNH) movement since 2016. Katia regularly participates in and facilitates "mindfulness" meetings, practices Non-Violent Communication, U Theory, including the Social Presencing Theater (SPT).

Camille has been involved with the work of Eurasia and ELI since 2017. Since July 2019 she is the treasurer of Eurasia Association and ELI.

She is documenting the Happy Schools Programme in Hué and created the Eurasia and ELI websites.

She participated in the Right Livelihood Programme at Schumacher College and holds a Master’s Degree in Science of Education. She is on the teacher training pathway for Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Camille will be spending 2020 working for Eurasia and ELI from the Peaceful Bamboo Family in Vietnam

Ngan has become a member of Eurasia since May 2018. She is on her training path to become a social therapist and a Nonviolent Communication trainer. She also loves her work at Happy Schools project, where she collaborates closely with the public school teachers to implement the program. For what she is doing, she hopes to make a humble contribution for a life-enriching education in Vietnam.

Ngan studied Professional Communication at RMIT University and was working as a copywriter and a communications officer.

Vy joined the ELI team in August 2018 as Happy Schools Programme Coordinator. She divides her time between working in The Peaceful Bamboo Family’s Waldorf Kindergarten and the Happy Schools Programme.

Thilo is currently doing an internship at the Eurasia Learning Institut in Switzerland while living in the Petit Bochet Community. He graduated in 2018 at the Waldorf school in Hanover, Germany and through contacts which were established during two Chandolin retreats he got the chance to come to Switzerland in February 2019 to work with Eurasia, to stay in a living community and to learn French. In October Thilo is starting to study psychology in Heidelberg while continuing some of his work for Eurasia.