Let’s Reboot the Future

Charmian Love is a leading voice in reimagining the role of business in creating a thriving future. Alongside her work as the Global Ambassador with Brazilian beauty and wellbeing company Natura, she serves as Mother Nature & Future Generations Director at House of Hackney - bringing the voice of nature into the boardroom and helping businesses think differently about the impact they have on the world around them.

Charmian shares where that conviction began: from campaigning to save whales as a child in Canada, to the lakes that shaped her love of nature and a powerful encounter with the Amazon where, as a friend told her, her “soul met its soil”. It’s a story about having the confidence to see things differently, holding onto what you care about and finding the courage to act on it.

More about Charmian Love:

Charmian (Char) Love is a fiercely determined optimist and believes in the power of people coming together to use business as a force for good. She is the Global Ambassador at Natura, a Brazilian-based beauty and wellbeing business, where she leads the International Advocacy function.

In a personal capacity, Char serves as the legal representative for Mother Nature and Future Generations on the board of House of Hackney.  She is also Executive in Residence at Oxford’s Said Business School, where she designed and teaches MBA and Executive MBA courses on topics such as Regenerative Business. 

Char’s work has been featured in publications including HBR, Wired, SSIR, and Fast Company and she delivered a TEDx talk on the topic: ‘How to be both in business and an activist’.

Her advisory and board commitments focus on integrating environmental and social value into financial systems, advocating for structural and cultural-level change and championing intergenerational dialogue:

• Member of the TNFD (Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures)
• Founding Working Group Member of the TISFD (Taskforce for Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures)
• Advisory Council member at the Capitals Coalition 
• Business Advisory Group member at Business for Nature
• Board Member of B Beauty Coalition
• Chair of the Board, Force of Nature

Before joining Natura, Char was Co-Founder, Chair and Activist in Residence at B Lab UK and Co-Founder of Volans. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an honours degree in Art History from Queen’s University.

Char enjoys long distance swimming, colourful clothing, bringing poetry into business meetings and hosting ‘Hartigan Dinners’ in her home in London. She has two rugby-loving teenage boys and a border collie who all keep her on her toes.

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Professor Steve Waygood is Chief Executive of The Finance Transition Centre and a leading voice in sustainable finance.

Having spent his career exploring how capital and markets can support sustainable development, Steve reflects on what he has learned about our financial systems - and how we can harness them to help create a better future.

But Steve’s story begins far from the world of finance, with a childhood dream of becoming a vet in the Yorkshire Dales, inspired by James Herriot and David Attenborough. He reflects on the unexpected path his life took, his work to drive change in areas from energy and climate to the health of our rivers, and what he would tell his younger self today: believe that you can drive change - and remember that none of us does it alone.

More about Professor Steve Waygood

Professor Steve Waygood, CEO, The Finance Transition Centre. 

Steve is Chief Executive of The Finance Transition Centre - a think tank and education centre focussed on mobilising capital in support of sustainable development - and a Trustee of WWF-UK. Previously, he was Chief Sustainable Finance Officer at Aviva Investors. He holds a PhD in sustainable finance and is Honorary Visiting Professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of Surrey. 

Steve has advised the UK Government, the European Commission, the G20, the Financial Stability Board, the OECD and the UN on the creation of sustainable capital markets. 

He has received awards from Brummell, the International Chamber of Commerce, the City of London, the United Nations Foundation, Yale and Harvard. In 2024, he was listed among the 80 most influential people in European finance by Financial News. 

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This week's Reboot Forum series episode features Ben Goldsmith, who talks about growing up fascinated by wildlife and refusing to let go of a vision of Britain living with wildlife. Visits to France as a child showed him it was possible, and by his teens he was writing to park rangers and Country Life magazine to make the case for bringing back species like wild boar.

Ben is hopeful about where the country is heading. He reflects on Britain's shift from a nation wary of wildness to one increasingly ready to trust nature to lead, and on what it takes to keep pushing for change even when the odds feel stacked against you.

More about Ben Goldsmith:

Ben has two decades of investment experience in green industries. He is co-founder of Nattergal Ltd, a natural capital company focused on restoring ecosystems at scale, and founded and chairs Conservation Collective, a growing network of locally-focused environmental philanthropic foundations. He also serves as a Trustee of the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, and was a non-executive director of the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2018 to 2022. Alongside all this, Ben hosts the Rewilding the World podcast, is author of God is an Octopus, and is rewilding land surrounding his family home in south Somerset.

You can listen to Ben Goldsmith’s weekly podcast ‘Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith’ here.

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This week’s guest is Aimee Felus, CEO of the Western Sussex Rivers Trust. Aimee loves working for Rivers Trusts, drawn to the reciprocity and energy she finds there. She and her team know the value of the work they do, for rivers and for people, particularly through the ecosystem services that help mitigate environmental issues like flooding and biodiversity loss.

She finds it challenging when others don't place that same value on the work, but this spurs her on to help people understand. Ultimately, Aimee feels that treating people with kindness and respect, fuelled by real passion for the work, takes you  a long way in bringing others on board. A grounded conversation about staying committed to work that matters.

More about Aimee Felus: 

Aimee has worked with water for 21 years, specialising in water quality issues, nature-based solutions and community engagement. Rivers captivate Aimee, for their vital place in the natural world, for their role in our culture and all that they offer to us. Aimee’s top river moments include hauling 3500 tyres from the Lea with amazing Thames21 volunteers, watching the sand martin’s aerial dance from a canoe on the Wye and seeing a river weave its magic into her son as he was charmed for hours on a paddleboard. Aimee feels very privileged to be able to work for her local rivers through the Western Sussex Rivers Trust.

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Hitendra Wadhwa has spent his career exploring what it really takes to live and lead well, work he now leads at Columbia Business School and through the Mentora Institute, which he founded. In this episode, he talks about the years he spent pulling back from the world (leaving strategy consulting and a Silicon Valley startup behind) to go deeper into his own inner life, and what that inner work eventually taught him: that the goal isn't to choose between the inner and outer world, but to find the intersection between them. He shares how that thinking played out in an unexpected place, a leadership programme he ran inside a Northern California prison.

That instinct not to inflict pain on others goes right back to childhood. Hitendra became a vegetarian at eight, in a Punjabi meat-eating family, and held to it even when it meant pushing against his own dinner table. It's a thread that runs through everything else he talks about: living an inspired life, and finding freedom not in our circumstances, but in how free we are on the inside.

More about Hitendra: 

Hitendra Wadhwa is the founder of the Mentora Institute and a professor at Columbia Business School, where he's won the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. He's the author of Inner Mastery, Outer Impact, and draws on the world's mystic traditions to codify the laws of success in life and leadership. Before academia, he was a strategy consultant at McKinsey and founded a Silicon Valley startup. He holds an MBA and PhD in Management Science from MIT's Sloan School of Management, and a BA with Honours in Mathematics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi.

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David Bell, creator of Belly Bugs, has found a way to get children genuinely excited about eating well. After thirty years in advertising, David turned his skills to a new challenge: gamifying the science of gut health for kids. He introduces children to the “gang of little helpers" living inside them, turning gut microbes into characters they want to feed with colourful fruit and vegetables, and it works. In a Sunderland pilot, a school cook reported children coming in and ordering salad straight away.

David describes his childhood in rural County Down as both heaven and hell: an idyllic dairy farm and close community, set against the backdrop of the Troubles. As a Protestant whose three best friends were Catholic, he wished everyone could cross divides as easily. His advice to his younger self, and it clearly runs deep, is simply this: never give up.

This episode celebrates the launch of the Belly Bugs X Reboot the Future Academic Calendar, find it here.

Read out blog 'Learning for Their World' based on David's episode here. 

More about David Bell:

Born in County Down, Northern Ireland in 1961, David graduated from Edinburgh University in 1987 with a PhD in Ancient Greek before joining ICI's marketing department in Manchester. In 1992 he founded his own advertising agency, Cheetham Bell, which became known as Manchester's "creative hotshop" and was bought by WPP in 2000. He went on to be CEO of JWT's Manchester office and Creative Director at global digital agency Mirum, before leaving advertising in 2017 to develop Belly Bugs, the children's IP he created to introduce kids to their gut microbes, which research is showing to be the silver bullet for childhood nutrition. He has published one Belly Bugs book with New River/Little River Books, with a second, "The Poo That Wouldn't Budge," due this autumn. A keen cyclist, David is fascinated by the natural world.

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This week we're joined by Jon Conradi, founder of Wild Mosaic, who is getting people rewilding without needing to own acres of land or live beside a nature reserve. Rewilders choose a three-metre by three-metre tile to follow, and Jon sends personal updates on their patch, the wildlife spotted there, and the progress of the land.

It began with a nature club he set up at primary school, sparked by watching a neighbour's tree cut down. Even then he sensed that caring about nature was one thing, but persuading others to take action invited the question, why does it matter? For Jon, rewilding has been a way through apathy and despair at environmental chaos, and what he loves most is the personal connection: knowing each rewilder, and the small joys of an otter sighting or a butterfly landing on someone's tile. 

www.wildmosaic.eco

More about Jon Conradi:

Jon Conradi is the founder of Wild Mosaic. He is getting people rewilding without them needing to own acres of land or live next to a wildlife site. The UK led the world in exploiting wildness, it's now time for us to lead the world in restoring it.

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Filippa Brundish, founder of The Kindness Cooporation, learned early just how much listening matters. A quiet child raised with little money but plenty of love, she spent her early years absorbing the world rather than speaking up in it, taking it all in like a sponge.

In time, she wanted to put that attentiveness to work. A project manager who loves getting things done, she took the brave, some might say naive, step of leaving a well-paid job to found The Kindness Coorporation, using her skills to design and deliver programmes that build kindness. Their flagship project Project JOY (Joining Older and Younger), brought schoolchildren and care home residents together, lighting up both. She hopes to see this project grow far beyond her corner of the UK.

Her advice to her younger self is about finding her voice: be bold, be brave, speak out sooner, but remain exactly who you are. The quiet dark horse, she's learned, has her own kind of strength, and people, and the relationships that matter, are everything.

More about Filippa & The Kindness Cooperation CIC

With 25 years' experience as a management consultant across both the private and public sectors, I've spent my career helping organisations plan, deliver and navigate change.  Three years ago, I decided to put that experience to work for good, founding The Kindness Cooperation CIC — a non-profit delivering projects with real social impacts, powered by the same project management skills I've honed throughout my career.  

Outside of work, I'm mum to two wonderful kids and married to a very gifted primary teacher. When I'm not juggling family and work life, you'll find me on the tennis or padel court, planning our next family holiday to France, or being dragged around the park by Ruby, our endlessly energetic cocker spaniel.

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Oliver Lloyd is a designer and systems thinker, with sustainability as the starting point of his work. He was once advised to "meet people where they are, but don't leave them there," and you get a strong sense of his enthusiasm for collaborating on projects where our connection to and care for nature is front and centre.

Oliver shares how he's used this approach with a brand that makes multi-tools. Finding the point where his ethos and their brand met, he's been able to take them on an exciting journey, designing tools for city gardeners with small spaces to spark their engagement with nature. Considering planetary boundaries as a next step in design and production then became a natural conversation.

Oliver is keen to share his work and methods, believing that an open source approach puts greater value on our planet, rather than only on the sale of the product. It's a challenge to business as usual, and it has met its share of pushback. But for Oliver, this way of working lets people feel part of a whole process, where their own agency and creative abilities are trusted and come to the fore.

More about Oliver: 

Oliver is a designer and systems thinker working at the intersection of physical product development, emerging technologies, and climate adaptation. I help early-stage ventures and mission-driven organisations design products, services, and systems that are regenerative from the ground up. My approach combines hands-on prototyping and manufacturing knowledge, co-creation, workshop facilitation, futures thinking and strategic foresight — so sustainability isn’t an afterthought, it’s the starting point. 

Oliver Lloyd Design

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Mary Ann Clements, Co-CEO of ADD International, has spent her whole life refusing to accept that "this is just the way the world is." As a child in a small Oxfordshire village, she felt every injustice keenly and couldn't fathom why the grown-ups had all given up.

That refusal became her work. At ADD, a participatory grant maker for disability justice across Africa and Asia, she led a full-scale rethink: ending the old programmes, handing the decisions to the disabled movements ADD exists to serve, and swapping "we know best" for genuine solidarity. Plenty called it naïve. She is honest about what was hard, and what helped get her through. 

Mary Ann believes we need to be brave and hopeful. She has a photo on her desk of herself, aged four, dancing in the garden, a reminder to bring that free spirit into the messy, serious business of changing the world.

Read our blog about this episode 'Turning the Ship' here.

More about Mary Ann:

Mary Ann Clements is a writer, facilitator and coach with over 25 years' international experience in social justice and organisational change. Most recently Co-CEO of ADD International, she helped transform it from a traditional NGO into a participatory grant-maker advancing disability justice, and was Co-Director of Healing Solidarity, which engaged over 3,500 people in reimagining global development through equity, care and collective action. 

She shares reflections on leadership, power and change through her Substack, How We Transform , and at maryannclements.com, and co-authored Red Tents: Unravelling Our Past and Weaving a Shared Future (2021). 

She is currently working on her first novel.

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