About us
Our vision
Our vision is a future in which everyone knows that we are part of an intelligent, living Earth.
Our aim is to lay the foundations for a new paradigm of leadership and polycrisis mitigation grounded in kincentric ecology, weaving human beings back into the wider web of life.
Our Story
The spark that became Kincentric Leadership was born in August 2022 at a gathering of researchers, practitioners and activists dedicated to mitigate, navigate and understand the polycrisis. Through conversation, meditation and workshops amongst and with beech, bladderwrack and flint, a group of us found a resonance - a kinship - in our love for life, our openness to many forms of knowing and un-knowing, and our fascination with the mindblowing intricacies and intelligences of the more than human world. ​That resonance turned into the 2023 - 2025 Kincentric Leadership Through the Polycrisis project, led by Justine Huxley and Anna Kovasna - generously funded by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and hosted by the Global Ecovillage Network.
Since 2025, Kincentric Leadership operates as a Community Interest Company registered in England and Cymru/Wales. This means we are a not-for-profit organisation legally committed to working for the benefit of more-than-human communities and the wider living world. All of our resources are reinvested into nurturing our mission of regenerative, relational leadership and practices that strengthen kinship with all life.
Our Inspirations & Teachers
We are grateful to all those who came before to show the way, including Thích Nhất Hạnh, Desmond Tutu, Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, countless tribes of Earth Peoples who have come and gone, and multiple teachers of interbeing including but not limited to Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Jain and Shamanic lineages.
We also thank and honour the many teachers still with us exploring what kincentrism means in the 21st century, including Joanna Macy, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Alice Walker, John Francis III, Barbara Smuts, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Pat McCabe, Suzanne Simard, Dennis Martinez, Enrique Salmón, Winona LaDuke, David Abram, Martin Shaw, Paco Calvo, Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Breytenbach, adrienne marie brown, Monica Gagliano, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Leah Penniman, James Bridle, Lyla June Johnson and Sophie Strand as well as the Matés, Shipibo and many other indigenous peoples, Maroon communities, the Ecovillage, Permaculture, Defend the Sacred, Black Feminist Thought, Queer and Decolonial movements, Local Futures, the Yaquerana and Druie rivers, several plant teachers, and many friends and more than human beings we have built close relationships with in our lives.
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All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere, the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal.
We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.
- James Bridle
Our People
Justine Huxley
Co-founder
Justine is a writer, facilitator, spiritual ecologist, and visionary whose core passion is awakening humanity to a deeper experience of kinship with all life. She co-founded Kincentric Leadership with Anna Kovasna and leads workshops, retreats, and trainings on aligning leadership and decision-making with Earth-based wisdom. She is also a Development and Outreach Consultant for the Bushman Heritage Museum in South Africa, and Director at a US foundation that funds regenerative work based in a worldview of Earth as sacred. Previously, Justine was CEO at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London, where she worked for 18 years, and pioneered programmes at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and peace-making. She is the author of Generation Y, Spirituality and Social Change, and holds a PhD in psychology. She belongs to a Sufi tradition, and has led meditation and dreamwork groups for more than two decades within a lineage that has consistently oriented its community and practice towards humanity's relationship with a living, sacred Earth. She lives close to River Lea in Hertfordshire UK and is in love with all things River.
Anna Kovasna
Co-founder
Anna is a systems thinker, creative convenor, and passionate weaver of resilience and kinship with all life. She cofounded Kincentric Leadership with Justine Huxley and works with communities worldwide to catalyse systems-change and regenerative practice rooted in animist and relational worldviews. With a long history in the ecovillage movement, Anna also serves as Strategic Lead for Community Resilience at the Global Ecovillage Network, is a trustee of Transition Network and Gaia Education, and cofounded the Living Systems Alliance, advancing more-than-human governance and place-based living-systems design. She lives with her more-than-human kin on a homestead in the Pyrenees, and brings a background in social anthropology, a deep love for the living world, and extensive experience in facilitation, community living, and grassroots organising.
Harry Hilser
Kincentric Social Weaver
Harry is a behavioural scientist, conservationist and environmental education consultant, with a deep passion and curiosity for exploring the cognitive, behavioural and psycho-spiritual underpinnings of what makes us human and a part of all. He has spent much of his life in Indonesia, learning about connectedness to nature, indigenous wisdom and the socio-cultural drivers and mediators of the values and practices that create, sustain or challenge societal norms. He is particularly interested in the associations between pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours and pathways to fostering ecocentrism and continues to explore this through his work, particularly through his environmental education consultancy, Lestari. Harry is a graduate of the first kincentric leadership cohort.
Supriya Mahabaleshwarkar
Kincentric Social Weaver
Supriya is a mother, poet and naturalist who loves to study and explore the relationship between nature and culture. She designs and conducts nature and heritage awareness programmes and is presently learning from sacred groves and their natural and associated cultural heritage in the Western Ghats, India. She is co-convenor of the Pune Chapter of INTACH – the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, a not-for-profit organisation in heritage conservation. She has co-authored research on the ecology and community stewardship of sacred landscapes and published materials on sacred groves in both Marathi and English, bringing together scientific insight and local knowledge to inspire conservation and cultural continuity. Supriya is a graduate of the first Kincentric Leadership cohort.
Pat McCabe
(Woman Stands Shining)
Advisory Group
Woman Stands Shining, Pat McCabe belongs to the Dine (Navajo) Nation. She is a Mother, writer, artist, activist and speaker and her work is driven by the study of the Science of Right Relations. Born to a People who have deep understanding and methodology for Restoration, Pat brings the understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing into discussion and inquiry on Sustainability. Pat is an active participant in Indigenous Peoples gatherings worldwide.
Bayo Akamolafe
Advisory Group
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world and is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, and author of 'These Wilds Beyond our Fences'. He is the Founder of The Emergence Network and hosts the postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He is the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Othering and Belonging Institute (University of California, Berkeley), Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, and Critic-in-Residence at the Otis College of Art and Design (2023).
Danielle Celemajer
Advisory Group
Dany is a thought-leader working at the intersection of human rights, environmental justice and animal justice. A Professor of Sociology at University of Sydney and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, she leads interdisciplinary projects for researchers, civil society groups and governments to develop praxes for facing the climate crisis in just and imaginative ways. She lives as part of an intentional multispecies community and is the author of Summertime: Reflections on a vanishing future.
Lyla June Johnson
Advisory Group
Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community orga-nizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, and traditional land stewardship practices. Her PhD focused on how pre-colonial Indigenous Nations produced abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
Laurie Layborne
Advisory Group
Laurie researches, writes and speaks on the global environmental emergency and explores the leadership needed to transition to more sustainable and equitable societies while contending with the growing destabilisation. He is the founder of Cohort 2040 and a Visiting Fellow at Chatham House, & an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He has a MPhil in economics from Oxford and a BSc in physics.
Betsy Taylor
Advisory Group
Betsy Taylor has a solid reputation as a philanthropic advisor, social change leader, motivational speaker and problem solver. She has led several non-profit groups and foundations. Betsy works to build the field of regenerative agriculture through grant-making, network development and global convenings about the potential of our lands to sequester carbon pollution while boosting food security and habitat protection.
Rachael Petersen
Advisory Group
Rachael is the founder of Earthrise Services, a consulting firm tackling our world’s greatest challenges. With a BA in Anthropology and Environmental Policy, Rachael has worked in remote sites from the Arctic to the Amazon. She has been a Senior Advisor to National Geographic Society and founding Deputy Director of Global Forest Watch, advancing climate change solutions by transforming our approach to food, agriculture, and land use. A practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Rachael is also a visiting fellow at Harvard Divinity School.
The Living Earth
Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. She is the third planet from our sun and has one moon. She is, so far, the only planet known by humans that sustains life. Along with many indigenous traditions, some religions and a growing number of contemporary scientists, we understand Earth to be a living, intelligent being. We aspire to include her perspectives through observing the natural world, watching global trends, using embodied imagination practices, through prayer, asking and subtle listening.
Our Funders & Partners
Human life is not sustained by its own power. Nature gives birth to human beings and keeps them alive. This is the relation in which people stand to nature. People do not create food, nature bestows it upon us. ― Masanobu Fukuoka
Photo credit: Diane Barker