Florian Guillaume

Chief Curator on CHNGMKR

Florian Guillaume, Chief Curator of CHNGMKR, recommends 99 changemakers, each one chosen and explained by name.

Changemakers recommended by Florian Guillaume

• Studio Roosegaarde, Rotterdam, Netherlands
  Daan makes technology into a conversation about the world we actually want.
• Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, N'Djamena, Chad
  Hindou carries her community's knowledge of the land onto the world stage, and we need that voice.
• Fratries, Nantes, France
  Sharing an ordinary city apartment turns out to be the most dignified support you can offer.
• Copenhill, Copenhagen, Denmark
  A power plant you can ski down is a bold idea, and I respect that they show its tensions honestly too.
• Ford Foundation, New York, USA
  Aiming their giving squarely at inequality, and divesting from fossil fuels, is leadership worth naming.
• Wildlife Conservation Fund / Hélène Grimaud, New York, USA
  A great pianist giving her fame to wolves is a union of art and wildness I find moving.
• Floating Farm, Rotterdam, Netherlands
  A dairy farm afloat in Rotterdam's port is a playful answer to cities running out of room.
• Biltoki, Anglet, France
  They revive a covered market by trusting the small producers who already feed the town.
• La Chartreuse, Aiguenoire, France
  Choosing to make less in order to stay true to themselves is a kind of courage I admire.
• Mellon Foundation, New York, USA
  Putting the arts and humanities first in their giving is a stance I find quietly brave.
• Instituto Terra, Aimorés, Brasil
  The Salgados replanted a dead farm into forest, and the springs and animals came back, which gives me hope.
• Oceans 2050, USA
  Alexandra is building the data that lets ocean farmers prove and earn from the carbon they store.
• Carboculture, Helsinki, Finland
  Turning farm waste into stable carbon is a quiet, useful answer to a loud problem.
• MIT Media Lab, Boston, MA, USA
  I keep coming back to their belief that the best ideas live between disciplines.
• Samsø Energy Academy, Samsø, Denmark
  An island that owns its own wind together is the clearest proof that energy can be democratic.
• Shorefast Foundation / Fogo Island Inn, Fogo island, Canada
  Zita Cobb came home and turned hospitality into a way to keep her island alive.
• Nicolas Nova, Genève, Suisse
  Nicolas taught designers to think like anthropologists, and it makes their work matter more.
• Birdgirl (Mya-Rose Craig), Bristol, UK
  Mya-Rose opens birdwatching and nature to communities too often left outside it.
• Navdanya, Dehradun, India
  Vandana Shiva defends seeds as a commons, and that fight protects farmers everywhere.
• Visionary Co., Nagoya, Japan
  Turns a demographic constraint into an opportunity, physical strength as vocation, not stigma.
• Café Marulanda, Yotoco, Colombia
  A former guerrilla growing peace through coffee is the kind of second life worth celebrating.
• Cesar Jung-Harada / Protei, Hong Kong, China
  Cesar treats open-source hardware as a public good, and that generosity is rare in invention.
• Maram Kaïré, Dakar, Senegal
  He opens the sky to young Africans and shows that space science belongs to the whole continent.
• Yellow Dot Studios, Los Angeles, USA
  Using sharp humor to name greenwashing is a way to keep people awake that I enjoy.
• CERN, Genève, Suisse
  Where we found the Higgs and invented the web, seventeen thousand scientists from a hundred countries work as one.
• Transition Network, Totnes, UK
  Rob taught me that imagining the future is itself a tool for the climate transition.
• Schumacher College, Dartington, UK
  A school that lives what it teaches, growing its own food and deciding together, is education I believe in.
• Notpla, London, UK
  Packaging you can eat or compost from seaweed feels like common sense we somehow forgot.
• The Child Movement, Greater Noida, India
  Licypriya started at eight, and she carries the voice of her generation with real force.
• Proxima Fusion, Munich, Allemagne
  A European route to fusion that runs continuously is a bet worth watching closely.
• Rotor Deconstruction, Bruxelles, Belgium
  They prove that salvaging a building's materials can pay for itself, which is what convinces builders.
• Rainforest Connection, San Francisco, USA
  Turning old phones into ears for the forest is the kind of frugal cleverness I love.
• Hasdeo, Raipur, India
  Alok stands between the forest and the mine, and he does it by amplifying the people who live there.
• Biofabricate, New York, USA
  Suzanne Lee built the community that lets grown materials move from the lab into real making.
• Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, USA
  Bryan Stevenson reminds me that getting close to injustice is where real change starts.
• Cecosesola, Barquisimeto, Venezuela
  A hundred thousand families running their own markets and clinics by assembly, since 1967, humbles me.
• Under The Pole, Concarneau, France
  They dive where science cannot easily reach and share everything they find.
• Skate Anima, Curitiba, Brazil
  Giving kids with cerebral palsy the real thrill of a skateboard is pure joy made practical.
• Gesda Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland
  Anticipating where science and diplomacy will collide is patient, necessary work.
• Low-Tech Lab, Concarneau, France
  What stays with me is that every solution they test gets open-sourced, so the knowledge belongs to everyone.
• Mondragon Corporation, Mondragon, Spain
  Eighty thousand worker-owners governing their own companies since 1956 is the most serious counter-model to shareholder capitalism I know.
• Café Joyeux, Paris, France
  A cafe run by people with disabilities, served with real hospitality, makes inclusion feel ordinary and warm.
• My Human Kit, Nantes, France
  Nicolas turned losing his hand into an open lab where people design their own solutions.
• Kéré Architecture, Berlin, Germany
  Francis Kere builds with local hands and materials, and the community owns the result.
• The Emergence Network, Chennai, India
  Bayo gives me permission to slow down and sit with questions instead of rushing to fix them.
• Nyaguthii Chege, Nairobi, Kenya
  Carrying forward Wangari Maathai's vision is no small task. Chege's stewardship matters because it keeps a foundational African environmental movement rooted in the women and communities who actually do the planting.
• Abderazzak Benchaabane, Marrakech, Maroc
  Forty years documenting Morocco's plants quietly saves knowledge that was about to disappear.
• Diazoma, Athens, Greece
  Bringing ancient theatres back to life for the towns around them is heritage that keeps breathing.
• Michel Mayor, Genève, Suisse
  He turned the question of whether we are alone into something we can actually measure.
• Ama, Japanese Freediving Women, Mie Prefecture, Japan
  Two thousand years of diving in rhythm with the sea, taking only enough to return, still teaches us how to live with the ocean.
• Sweet Om, Lamentin (Guadeloupe), France
  Therese grows wellbeing out of a Creole garden, and the care in it is real.
• Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Svalbard, Norway
  A cold mountain holding more than a million seeds is the most patient insurance humanity has.
• Atelier Berger Milà, Paris, France
  A young Franco-Spanish duo whose work treats architecture as a connective tissue between people and territory, a quiet, exacting practice that scales from a single room to the urban fabric.
• rrreefs, Zurich, Suisse
  Printing reef bricks shaped like real coral gives larvae a home to colonize, which is beautifully direct.
• Refugee Food Festival, Paris, France
  Putting refugee chefs in great kitchens lets them arrive as talent, with stories worth tasting.
• Fonds Explore, Concarneau, France
  They back the expeditions that help us understand a world we are still learning to protect.
• Billion Oyster Project, New York, USA
  Urban ecological restoration at scale with an exemplary educational dimension, a rare model of city/ocean reconciliation.
• Studio Other Spaces, Berlin, Germany
  Eliasson and Behmann make spaces that ask you to feel your place in nature.
• Final Spark, Lausanne, Suisse
  Running computation on living neurons sounds impossible, and they actually let scientists try it from anywhere.
• Village Alzheimer, Dax, France
  Letting people with Alzheimer's keep an ordinary life, with a real shop and bistro, is deeply humane.
• Plastic Odyssey, Marseille, France
  Simon's ship shows coastal towns how to make plastic a local resource they can use.
• Heatherwick Studio, London, UK
  Thomas argues that buildings should move us, and his work makes that case hard to ignore.
• Institut Océanographique Paul Ricard, île des Embiez, France
  Fifty years of independent Mediterranean science, freely open to the public, is a gift.
• Sailcoop, Vannes, France
  I like that they make crossing the Atlantic by sail feel like a real option again.
• We Are Sista, Paris, France
  Tatiana and her collective turned the gender funding gap into a movement, then built the fund to help close it.
• Ibn Al Baytar / Zoubida Charrouf, Rabat, Maroc
  Zoubida gave argan its science and made sure the women who harvest it earn from it.
• Les Beaux Mets, Marseille, France
  A Marseille kitchen where excellence and second chances grow together, and the food is genuinely good.
• Cloudfisher, Agadir, Morocco
  Harvesting drinking water straight from fog is a simple idea that changes lives in dry places.
• Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre, Mogadishu, Somalia
  Ilwad chose to return to Mogadishu to do this work, and that choice tells you everything.
• Wael Shawky, Alexandria, Egypt
  Shawky makes history feel unstable in the best way. His puppets and staged operas remind us that every official account is a construction, and that reclaiming the telling is itself a form of resistance.
• Écomaris, Montréal, Canada
  Making plankton visible is a quiet way to help us care about the half of our oxygen we never see.
• Libera Terra, Corleone, Italy
  Turning land taken from the mafia into honest farming work is justice you can taste.
• Taisugar Circular Village, Taisugar, Taiwan
  A village designed so materials keep circulating is a calm, livable picture of the circular economy.
• Why Kamikatsu, Kamikatsu, Japan
  A town that sorts its waste into 45 streams shows that the hard part is culture, and they did it.
• Shinichiro Ogata, Tokyo, Japan
  Ogata carries Japanese tradition into the present with a care that touches everything he makes.
• Phytobokaz, Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe, France
  Dr. Joseph gives Caribbean plant knowledge the scientific footing it always deserved.
• Alenvi, Paris, France
  Letting small teams of caregivers truly own their work dignifies everyone in the room.
• Knepp Wildland / Isabella Tree, Dorset, UK
  Letting a worn-out farm go wild brought back turtle doves and nightingales, and that story changed how I think about land.
• isiMpondo, Xolobeni, South Africa
  Their stand for ancestral land reminds me that protecting a place and honoring the people on it are one and the same.
• World Access for the Blind, Los Angeles, USA
  Daniel taught himself to see with sound and now teaches thousands, which expands what we think a person can learn.
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation, London, UK
  Ellen gave the circular economy its language, and that language shaped real policy.
• Refettorio Paris, Paris, France
  Bottura turns surplus food into beautiful meals served with dignity, and the beauty matters here.
• Fairphone, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Bas showed that a phone can be built with repair and fair sourcing in mind, and that pressures the whole industry.
• Ocean Alive, Setúbal, Portugal
  Raquel hands the work of protecting the seagrass to the fisherwomen who know the estuary best.
• Bôndy, Antananarivo, Madagascar
  Reconnecting Madagascar's communities with the forest they depend on is regeneration done with people.
• Wanjira Mathai, Nairobi, Kenya
  Carrying forward the Green Belt Movement while shaping continental climate policy. She makes the link between restored landscapes and restored dignity feel obvious.
• Novo Nordisk Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark
  The scale of their giving is enormous, and I respect that so much of it reaches health that touches ordinary lives.
• Valldaura Self-Sufficient Labs, Barcelona, Spain
  A forest that is at once the resource, the classroom and the curriculum is my idea of a good lab.
• Paul Emilieu Studio, Paris, France
  Starting every project from what already exists is craft and conscience working together.
• Plateau Urbain, Paris, France
  Keeping empty buildings alive between projects makes room for people who could never afford the rent.
• Eurasanté, Lille, France
  Building a health-innovation cluster gave a whole region a future after industry.
• Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, Bra, Italy
  Carlo Petrini reminded us that eating well is a pleasure worth defending everywhere.
• SOLshare, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  Letting neighbors share their solar power makes clean energy reachable for the poorest, which is the whole point.
• makesense, Paris, France
  They put collective intelligence to work for changemakers, two hours at a time.
• La Preuve par 7, Paris, France
  Proving an idea by practice, with the people who live there, is urbanism I trust.
• 350.org, Washington DC, USA
  Anchoring a global movement to a single number gave the climate fight a clear line to hold.
• Senseable City Lab (MIT), Cambridge, USA
  Carlo Ratti reads the city as a living organism, and his work helps us see ourselves inside it.
• Simonetta Cheli, Frascati, Italy
  Turning satellite data into tools for climate decisions is European responsibility at its best.
• Lucas Davaze, Médiation Climat, GRENOBLE, France
  Taking people to stand on a dying glacier turns climate from an idea into a memory they keep.

A curator on CHNGMKR, a cartography of people reshaping how change happens, curated by changemakers. Browse the full cartography or see the full directory.