Our Team

I have almost a decade of experience in consulting, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement in the energy and economic transition of European carbon-intensive regions. I have worked closely with European Union agencies, national and local authorities, trade unions, NGOs, and businesses.

As the Just Transition Program Director at the Polish Green Network, I am responsible for creating region-specific and nationwide net-zero policies and solutions with a focus on the labor market, economic, and social development in Europe.
In recent years, I have worked closely with the Eastern Wielkopolska and Silesia regions. As a result of the cooperation of local government, business and civil society in which I was engaged from the beginning Eastern Wielkopolska received €415 million, and Silesia received €2.4 billion from the European Commission. The allocation for Silesia is the largest sum of all the European coal regions that applied for funding from the Just Transition Fund (JTF).

The Just Transition Fund is already being spent on the economic diversification of regions that historically built their economies on coal mines and coal power plants. The Fund specifically supports the local economy by investing in small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) working on renewable energy, clean mobility, and other green sectors. The first new jobs – including cooperative jobs – are already being created from the JTF.
I took part in preparing the entire process from scratch within the framework of the European Commission’s initiative “Just Transition Platform,” established in 2018. Since then, I have been involved in preparing the Territorial Just Transition Plans (TJTPs) and negotiating the process until the final positive decision of the European Commission in December 2022. It was 4 years of intense work as a bridge builder between the EU Commission and regional stakeholders.

After the successful acquisition of funds, I participated in monitoring bodies, advising the regions on the efficient spending of the funds from Just Transition Fund.
For the last 10 years I have also been closely linked to Sri Lanka personally and professionally. As South-North cooperation is key for tackling climate change I would like now to offer my expertise to just and green transformation projects in the Global South.
I am a social psychologist and hold a bachelor’s degree in International Relations. Before focusing on green transformation, I worked in rural areas, raising public awareness about inequalities between provinces and big cities as the producer of a pioneering movie “Fading” (Niepamięć) – the first documentary on the contemporary effects of the legacy of slavery of the Polish peasants.

I have spent almost 30 years creating and progressively refining design-based brands and building infrastructure for responsible-minded businesses to flourish.
In the last 20 years, my organization, Colombo Fashion Week, has created a fashion ecosystem in Sri Lanka, opening doors for the new generation to take up fashion as a profession. Colombo Fashion Week, which is now recognized in South Asia, has had a maximum impact in transforming the fashion industry.

15 years ago, I led the team for a global positioning program for Sri Lanka Apparel and coined the phrase “Garments with Guilt.” This helped us win the first Global Effie in Asia, but more importantly, it ignited my passion for creating sustainable solutions in the fashion industry—replacing the word „Sustainable” with „Responsible.”
Pigeon Island Tropicalwear became Asia’s first brand to bring tangibility to plastic recycling by using numbered bottles to create fabric. Before that, Arugam Bay Beachwear took South Asia by storm with sustainable surf-based fashion accessories. Conscience was Sri Lanka’s first responsibility-based menswear brand, sourcing woven fabric from a source that maintains the tiger reserve corridor.

The Responsible Fashion Summit was created in 2017 to present action-based ideas that transform fashion supply chains in Asia, through a platform that invites leaders.
In 2019, Responsible Meter, a garment evaluation tool, was introduced to score a garment’s sustainability on environmental and societal parameters. It is our organization’s intellectual property and one of its kind in the world.
In 2022, CFD (College of Fashion and Design) was launched as a campus in collaboration with design capitals of the world, structured to be one of the best in this part of the world, offering responsible design education in all design disciplines.