Youth Leadership and Well-being Champion

Antoine has a strong vision for the role of education and the leadership of young people in cultivating societies where people understand the interdependence that ties their lives together and work to grow the well-being of whole communities and achieve social justice.

He has been an educator in the field for over ten years in various settings, working closely with teenagers: first as a summer camp counselor and coordinator, then in after-school programs, and as a high school assistant and basket-ball coach.

His commitment for developing the leadership of teenagers has led him to work from 2015 to 2017 as International Coordinator for the La Salle Youth Movement, a network of tens of thousands of teenagers and young adults associated with one of the 1000 La Salle schools and other educational works spread out in 80 countries. His role was to support local, national and continental efforts to develop youth leadership and to chair the International Council of Young Lasallians. His two-year stint was marked by the development of formal support structures on the continent of Africa, a stronger social media presence in all three official languages of the community and an international gathering of 400 young people from over 20 countries.

In 2018, Antoine then pursued further studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the field of Education Policy to figure out how such movements to grow young people’s leadership could be cultivated at scale. His main achievements during his master’s degree include research work for the Ministry of Education of Côte d’Ivoire, the leadership of a student club dedicated to social emotional learning and a capstone research project on generative social fields in the context of towns and cities.

He then went on to serve as Strategy Consultant at Dynamo, a consulting firm based in Montreal that relies on collective intelligence practices to support the development of non-profits and roundtables in the province of Quebec, Canada. There, Antoine led many cross-sector collective processes where stakeholders would plan together for the well-being of whole communities, especially youth and families, in the spirit of collective impact and appreciative inquiry approaches. He has also explored liberating and decolonizing practices of facilitation and research.

Meanwhile, Antoine completed the First Cohort of Compassionate Systems Master Practitioners. He started to work in October of 2020 as part of the staff of the Center for Systems Awareness to grow its youth leadership work.

abeland@systemsawareness.org