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About us | Team

Meet the team

Impact Hub Amsterdam has a multi-disciplinary team, who are dedicated to accelerate the transition to a sustainable society and economy. In this, we are supported by a vast network of mentors, trainers and advisors specialised in all important drivers in the impact field. Get to know us and connect.
Our team

Marina Lanza

Marketing Communications Support

Marina is our Marketing and Communications Support. She runs our social channels, writes our newsletter, and helps our team create and execute communications campaigns for our partner programs. She is passionate about design, creating content, and eager to learn new things. In her free time she is a salsa dancer and teacher!

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Susan Kessing

Accelerate Lead

Susan brings over 10 years of experience in startups, venture building and corporate innovation. Her entrepreneurial mindset developed during her time as the COO and first hire of a fintech startup until its acquisition by a Dutch broker. The startup pioneered the democratization of a healthy financial future through a robo-advisor. A career in venture building for corporate clients and sustainable innovation in the financial sector followed. Susan focused on circular construction in her latest role as Innovation Manager Sustainability at ABN AMRO Bank N.V. Throughout her career, Susan has always prioritized impact. She’s a board member of TEDxAmsterdam, where she founded the Impact Program that helps accelerate social and sustainable innovation.

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Minne Staverman

Financial Planning

Minne is an experienced financial who knows exactly what helps creative and growing businesses forward. With 20 years of work experience she quickly recognises what is going on with companies and people. She is a strong sparring partner who helps entrepreneurs to clarify their goals and processes. As a business consultant and team coach, she knows which bottlenecks arise in a growing company and how to solve them. Finance is her core and she immediately clarifies the financial consequences in considerations and strategy.

Emily Rendel

Start-up Ecosystem Coordinator

Emily is part of the Accelerate team and is focussing on creating a vibrant community within our startup ecosystem. She is curating inspiring projects and events aimed at nurturing a community of impact innovators. She wants to foster an environment of knowledge sharing to craft the finest incubator and accelerator programs to help our entrepreneurs on their impact journey.

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Gabriella Blakstad

Innovate Analyst

Gabriella is our Innovate analyst and connects clients with the latest innovations. She studied sustainable development in Uppsala (Sweden) and political communication in Amsterdam and loves to transform tricky research findings to clear trends, insights and opportunities.

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Evan van der Holst

Innovate Lead

Innovation Lead at Impact Hub Amsterdam, part of the international worldwide impact network, with a diverse track record in consultancy, corporates, SME and as an entrepreneur. For 5 years, Evan managed SyncVR, a Health Tech company focussed on improving patients’ lives through Virtual Reality.  He previously worked at Slimmer AI, a venture studio that co-builds and invests in new ventures with innovative founders, and he worked as a startup trainer and coach for the city of Amsterdam. From his expertise and hands-on background, Evan supports businesses in becoming (more) impact driven, through pragmatic and hands-on impact innovation services. Creating an impact through innovation has become the baseline of his life and thus of his clients.

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Charley Snoek

Innovate Specialist

Charley is an innovate specialist at Impact Hub Amsterdam. She scouts the best solutions on a daily basis, inspires clients and is a strong strategic thinker for impact. Her expertise has been built up by working together with corporates as IKEA, Google, Cartier to startups and the City of Amsterdam. Before she fell in love with Innovation, she performed several communication roles and strategic advisory. Charley studied Environmental studies and communications at the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen.  This unique combination of innovation and entrepreneurial knowledge and hands-on strategic & communication experience helps clients to navigate through the impact landscape and turn problems into opportunities.

 

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Loraine Schuijt

Operations Manager & Controller

Loraine is the wizard behind the curtain, passionately blending finance operations, HR, and project management to keep the business running like a well-oiled machine. With a knack for optimizing HR processes and mastering financial operations, Loraine ensures the team has the best tools and systems in place. Energized by the challenge of keeping everything on track, Loraine brings a spark of innovation and efficiency to every project.

Etienne Fournier

Graphic Designer

Etienne is our Graphic Designer. He studied Design & Advertising in Paris and Edinburgh has a real knack for digital communications. He likes to tell stories through his work – preferably as part of a creative campaign. He loves to think outside the box, and is always eager to learn new things.

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Ilse Kwaaitaal

Director

Ilse is director of Impact Hub the Netherlands, she guides more than 100+ companies a year on topics such as innovation, impact transformation, and systemic change. Ilse studied Social Psychology and she holds  a Master degree in International Development. From her role as energy consultant she transitioned into developing growth programs for impact startups, scouting the best innovations and today Ilse actively helps hundreds of midsize and large businesses become more sustainable through innovation.

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Manon Klein

Director

With an MSc in anthropology and over 15 years of experience Manon heads up our Innovation and Acceleration department. She leads the development, implementation, and facilitation of our innovation & acceleration programs and has a deep understanding of impact investing, startups, impact entrepreneurship, and strategy. Also she is a driving force behind our ecosystems, which she builds to support entrepreneurs who are laying the foundations for a sustainable economy.

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Sabrina Dekkers

Bookkeeper

Sabrina keeps a watchful eye on our financials and ensures everything is in its place for reports, analyses, and audits. She has deep knowledge of our software systems, which she uses to make our processes more modern and efficient. Her goal is to make Impact Hub Amsterdam a paperless business ASAP!

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Vincent van Triest

Marketing,

Vincent works on our growth, marketing, events, and digital product development. His pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and broad skill set enables him to support the team across various areas, making him a highly versatile asset. Constantly seeking optimization opportunities, Vincent excels at identifying and implementing solutions that drive improvement. In his free time, he enjoys bouldering and diving into his many passion projects.

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Mentors

David Peters

Mentor

Vice President of Finance at Coyote Logistics, David is a passionate all-round CFO with expertise in building and optimising the finance, tax, legal and HR functions in various stages of a company’s lifecycle: from start-up through scale-up to maturity, privately owned or backed by external or corporate investors. 

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Drees Peter van den Bosch

Mentor

General Director of Hutton, Drees Peter works to make business catering services more sustainable, focusing on clients, employees, guests and society.

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Enver Loke

Mentor

Enver, Managing Director of Chocolatemakers, has over 10 years of sustainable chocolate manufacturing, 11 years of (green) building experience, as well as 6 years of sustainable product development in tourism & leisure industry. He also has impressively varied experience helping small scale sustainable innovations as well as large scale city transitions to sustainability.

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Jeroen Slappendel

Mentor

Jeroen is an independent consultant with a passion for brands, strategy, innovation and understanding human behaviour, focusing on brands and companies that are looking for real change and positive impact.

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Leontine Gast

Mentor

Leontine, CEO and Director of The Terrace, believes business and brands are the best agents to create positive change.  She believes that positioning needs purpose as people like to connect to brands that share the same beliefs as themselves. In her work Leontine demonstrates a knack for meaningful marketing.

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Liesbeth Gouwens

Mentor

Liesbeth is a mentor on our Food Acceleration Programme and Director of Bites We Love: healthy nut-based snacks in six flavours, wrapped in colourfully designed bioplastic packaging. Each portion contains only natural ingredients and always your DRI of nuts. 

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Marcel Aarts

Mentor

Marcel is a mentor for our Investment Ready Program and scaling programs. He has spent over 12 years in the telecoms industry, building new businesses, opening up new markets, developing new services and business models around the world. For 6 years, Marcel has worked in the IT hardware business, turning a market laggard into a billion dollar market leader in EMEA and boosting profits for all its business partners.

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Marielle van Gorp

Mentor

With more than 20 years experience in the Online Travel, Hospitality & Tourism industry – of which 16 years was spent taking Booking.com from startup to global leader – Marielle is a global business and people developer with experience in the full lifecycle of the business. She is skilled in scaling fast growing organisations, developing successful businesses & strategic partnerships and leading & developing high-performing global cross-functional and cross-regional teams.

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Niels Groenewoud

Mentor

Niels is a passionate marketing professional with experience in food, category management, product management and trade and shopper marketing. He has gained this experience from different perspectives, namely retail, food service and producer. In addition, he was very closely involved in the development and execution of a start-up in retail for several years and is one of our start-up mentors at Impact Hub.

 

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Niki van Wijk

Mentor

Niki, from Due North Consultancy, believes the future of most businesses is about people, creativity and using data and tech to create impact. Connecting the left and right brain is essential for any organisation or person. Niki helps shape the potential future of organisations, as well as a better future for our planet.

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Reinier Mommaal

Mentor

One of our longstanding Investment Ready Programme mentors, Reinier founded CleanBridge: the “bridge” between new and disruptive (clean) technologies and their markets. Reinier is also a member on the board of the Smart Circle Foundation, an independent platform, funded by companies, centres of expertise and networking organizations that share the conviction that the latest in green innovations and ground breaking scientific research must be promoted globally, thus informing and inspiring a large audience worldwide.

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Trainers

Jasper Mutsaerts

Trainer

As The Startup Coach © Jasper helps social entrepreneurs to set bold aspirations, build teams, grow their business and be a force for good. So far he has coached over 300 founders and CEOs of startups across multiple industries (e.g. travel, plastics, happiness, healthcare, culture) and geographies (e.g. Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, US).

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Jeroen Wilms

Trainer

Jeroen is a strategy, monitoring, evaluation, learning, and narration professional focused on impact entrepreneurs. He believes that purpose-driven organisations – and the impact ecosystem at large – will excel when the art of articulating and narrating outcomes becomes a common, accessible, and affordable practice.

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Peter Fechter

Trainer

Peter helps impact entrepreneurs come to informed financial decisions and supports them with the more advanced tax and business economics challenges.

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Tijmen Rümke

Trainer

Tijmen has helped creative entrepreneurs become business-savvy for many years. It drives him nuts that simple things can hold back so much creativity. Good work for the right reasons makes the world a better place. He graduated in physics, became a business consultant, started a university,, is an Art of Hosting practitioner, and an emotional brainiac. Tijmen is curious, self-aware, and easily excited by the boring things.

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Sheila Schenkel

Trainer

Sheila gives pitch workshops using the Best3Minutes Methodology©. She is the co-author of “Zet jezelf op de kaart,” in which she helps people get to the next level, by having a thorough look at how they present themselves.

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Co-founders

Frederike Vos

Co-founder

Thomas Vaassen

Co-founder

Tatiana Glad

Co-founder & former Director, IH Amsterdam; Exec Director, IH global network

Tatiana Glad is an entrepreneur, sustainability practitioner, and change strategist working across sectors and cultures. She has a focus on impact entrepreneurship, urban innovation, sustainable business, and the next generation. She is co-founder and director of Impact Hub Amsterdam, co-founder of Waterlution, and chair emeritus of the global Impact Hub Board. With an MSc in Responsible Business Practice, Tatiana sees enterprise as a vehicle for social change.

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