Co-founder and chair of the board of Transition Netherlands and initiator of Transition Town Deventer. and Olst in Transition. He started out as a journalist and consequently worked for 13 years at a regional educational centre for international cooperation and sustainable development, of which he was director in the last five years until 2007. In that period his work also took him to Rwanda, Ethiopia and Great Britain for the purpose of diverse international educational projects about watermanagement, renewable energy and health care.
In 2006 he initiated the Aardehuis ecovillage project and a cooperative by the same name, which in 2012-2015 built 23 homes and a community centre nearby the village of Olst. The concept of Aardehuizen is a Dutch variant of the earthship concept: fully self-sustaining homes constructed with second hand and natural materials.
From 2008 onwards, he is working as a self-employed consultant and trainer, specialized in local sustainability issues, in his company Inclusief-services. Amongst other, for three consecutive years he was guest lecturer Sustainable Buildingconcepts at the Engeneering faculty of the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences.
For Transition Netherlands he is working as a national fundraiser, one of the national media-spokespersons and international liaison officer in Transition Network. Furthermore he is internationally accredited as the senior Transition Trainer for starting and advanced local Transition Initiatives. He also facilitated trainings for Transition Network in Sweden and Denmark.
Currently, he is also involved in the ecovillage movement as one of the co-founders and board members of GEN Netherlands, and has just started a Tiny Houses Cooperative to promote this type of small-scale housing.
His two 11 and 15 year old daughters are an important source of inspiration for him to continue on his current path
In 2010 he was awarded a place in a regional Sustainability Top 100 by the association of entrepreneurs VNO-NCW. In 2011 en 2012 the national newspaper Trouw put him in a high ranking position in their own Sustainable 100 , a national listing of ‘the 100 most influential Dutch persons in the field of suststainability’.
