Leadership Team

The people behind the program.

The team leading the Global Mayors Academy — and the wider community of faculty, advisors, and co-founders within which we work.

A small team, a wider movement.

The team below carries day-to-day responsibility for the Global Mayors Academy. Behind us stands a much larger community: an Advisory Team, more than 70 faculty members and contributors, 125+ co-founders of Living Cities Earth across 30+ regions, and a growing network of institutional and affiliate partners. We are accountable to that community as much as we are to ourselves.

Operational Team

Day-to-day leadership.

The people running the Academy week to week — strategy, operations, academics, growth, platform, partner support, and technology.

Ferial Puren

Ferial Puren

Chief Executive Officer

Ferial leads the Global Mayors Academy as CEO, holding strategic direction, ecosystem development, and the integration of the program into the wider Living Cities Earth mission. She represents GMA in international dialogues on regenerative city development and is the primary architect of our strategic partnerships across education, governance, and city transformation.

Darrell Gooden

Darrell Gooden

Chief Operating Officer

Darrell leads operations and distribution as COO, working closely with the go-to-market team to convert strategy into delivery. His role is to keep the system running while removing the practical barriers that get in the way of growth — and to act as a buffer between long-term thinking and short-term execution.

Lev Gordon

Lev Gordon

Co-Founder Chair, Advisory Team

Lev is the visionary initiator of the Global Mayors Academy and chairs our Advisory Team. He is also the principal co-founder of Living Cities Earth, a global initiative supporting regenerative development in 10,000 cities. Trained at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and London Business School, Lev brings systemic depth, executive pragmatism, and civic imagination to the work.

Dr. Paddy Pampallis

Dr. Paddy Pampallis

Academic Director

Paddy leads accreditation, program design, and faculty engagement as Academic Director. Her work shapes the educational architecture of the City Leaders Program, ensuring that what is taught is rigorous, transformative, and genuinely useful to the mayors and senior officials we serve.

Anton Aparin

Anton Aparin

Chief Marketing Officer Go-to-Market Lead

Anton leads marketing and sales for the Global Mayors Academy and serves as project manager for the City Leaders Program launch. His work spans audience development, affiliate activation, decision-call conversion, and the global community that grows alongside the program.

Alexander Maneev

Alexander Maneev

Chief Technology Officer

Alex leads the full technical stack at GMA as CTO, with responsibility for all digital systems — website, CRM, payments, affiliate infrastructure, webinar platforms, and integrations. He brings more than two decades of experience in digital products and AI-augmented delivery to the work.

Pieter Wackers

Pieter Wackers

Platform & Design Lead

Pieter leads the technical platform and design operations for the Global Mayors Academy, including payments, the affiliate-tracking infrastructure, and the website. He is the team's bridge between design intent and operational delivery, and the steward of our technical foundation as the program scales.

Lucille Reynolds

Lucille Reynolds

Administration · Partner Support

Lucille leads administration and partner support, with particular focus on the day-to-day operations that keep our distribution communications coherent and our partners well looked-after. She is part of the quiet machinery that lets the rest of us do our work.

Ionut-Adrian Grigoras

Ionut-Adrian Grigoras

Technology

Adrian supports the Global Mayors Academy's technology stack, with responsibility for website integrations, payment flows, and the technical setup behind our webinars and registration systems.

Advisory Team

Guidance and expertise.

Practitioners, scholars, city leaders, and co-founders of Living Cities Earth who advise, guide, and contribute to the direction of the Global Mayors Academy.

Dr. Robert Fischer

Dr. Robert Fischer

Advisor · President, Living Cities Earth Association

Dr. Robert Fischer is President of the Living Cities Earth Association, incorporated under Swiss law, and a member of strategic boards. A specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy, he practises as an individual, couple and group psychotherapist and trainer for psychotherapists across various European countries. He is committed to linking inner human development with the development of cities — reducing hostility towards life within us and in the world, whilst promoting a life-affirming attitude both internally and externally. At GMA, his work is to connect city leaders to resources inside and outside themselves, building the courage, trust, stability, and flexibility to face the challenges of city leadership.

Alec von Graffenried

Alec von Graffenried

Advisor · Former Mayor of Bern

Former Mayor of Bern (2017–2024), Alec brings the lived experience of senior Swiss city leadership to our advisory work. As a former mayor of one of Europe's most diverse and effectively-governed cities, his perspective shapes how we think about leadership at the scale that matters most.

Mathias Müller

Mathias Müller

Advisor · City President of Lichtensteig, Switzerland

City President of Lichtensteig since 2012, most recently re-elected with 94.5% of the vote. Under his leadership, Lichtensteig received the national Wakker Prize in 2023 for its Mini.Stadt 2025 transformation. He is a member of the St. Gallen Cantonal Parliament and one of the first Living City Lab hosts.

Kriton Arsenis

Kriton Arsenis

Advisor · Environmental Strategy & Nature Restoration

Award-winning global environmental strategist with decades of experience in nature restoration, rewilding, and systemic environmental change. Kriton specialises in turning 'mission impossible' environmental challenges into grounded, implemented strategies — bridging ecological vision with real-world action in landscapes, ecosystems, and communities.

Daniel Krutzinna

Daniel Krutzinna

Advisor · Investment Strategy & City Positioning

Non-executive director, supervisory board member, and consultant with deep experience across private equity, consulting, start-ups, and capital markets. A co-founder of Living Cities Earth, Daniel advises on how cities can position themselves to attract aligned investment and develop place-based strategies that create lasting value.

Dr. Marilyn Hamilton

Dr. Marilyn Hamilton

Advisor · Co-founder, Living Cities Earth

Founder of Integral City Meshworks and co-founder of Living Cities Earth. Author of the Integral City book series. Marilyn brings the foundational frameworks of whole-city intelligence to the Academy — helping leaders understand their cities as living systems with four integrated voices: citizens, civic managers, business innovators, and civil society.

Dr. Alexander Laszlo

Dr. Alexander Laszlo

Advisor · Co-founder, Living Cities Earth

Director of Research at the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research and author of over a hundred publications. A co-founder of Living Cities Earth, Alexander advises on living systems and evolutionary design — helping city leaders move beyond reactive problem-solving towards consciously designing systems that support life, through his frameworks of integral thrivability and syntony.

Anne-Marie Voorhoeve

Anne-Marie Voorhoeve

Advisor · Co-founder, Living Cities Earth

Founder and Strategic Connector of The Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence, and co-founder of the School of Social Alchemy and Living Cities Earth. An internationally recognised practitioner in multi-stakeholder collaboration, she has been awarded the World Peace Forum's Outstanding Peace Activist Award and Meshworker of the Year by Integral City. Author of Flourishing Through Coherence: Meshworking Multi-Stakeholders, and a certified ECOintention Practitioner and Spiral Dynamics facilitator. At GMA, she brings the practice of weavership into the program — supporting city leaders to move beyond siloed approaches, build connections across sectors and stakeholders, and create the relational infrastructure required for collective action.

"In Switzerland 4 languages, many cultures. In Bern live people from 160 countries… They make Bern great again and again, every single day."

Alec von Graffenried · former Mayor of Bern

Faculty and the wider community

The teaching, mentorship, and expertise comes from a much wider community.

The leadership team above does not, on its own, deliver the City Leaders Program. Behind it stands a broader network of practitioners, scholars, and civic leaders who shape what participants experience.

70+

Faculty members and contributors drawn from cities, universities, civic-innovation networks, and integral-leadership traditions across 50+ countries.

125+

Living Cities Earth co-founders across 30+ regions, who shape strategy across the wider movement of which GMA is part.

∞

A growing network of institutional partners — mayoral associations, NGOs, universities, and international bodies who carry the program into networks beyond our own reach.

We will publish a detailed faculty page as the Founding Cohort approaches. In the meantime, if you would like to know more about a specific area of the curriculum or a particular contributor, please write to us.

Join the wider community

Get in touch

For press, partnership, or accreditation.

If you would like to speak with someone on the leadership team specifically — for press, partnership, accreditation, or any other reason that warrants a direct conversation — please write to contact@globalmayors.academy with a short note about the nature of your request, and we will route you to the right person.

The Global Mayors Academy is a program of Living Cities Earth, a Swiss charitable association.