Team of the Dekeyser&Friends Foundation

Helmut Bauer

Pro Bono Tax Advisor

Helmut was born in 1949 and grew up in Rosenheim, Bavaria. After studying economy at the university of Rosenheim he worked at BMW AG in Munich, in the controlling department. Later he went on to an external auditing company where he became a shareholder. Since 1997, Helmut has been the owner of a tax and auditing company and since then has acted as the main tax advisor for the Dedon-Group. Helmut provides tax and accounting advice to the foundation.

Helmut lives with his wife Evelyn, his daughter and his grandchildren in Baldham near Munich. He enjoys skiing, hiking, playing tennis and relaxes playing with his cat and dog. and any kind of adventure or endurance sport..

Manuela de Assis Borttscheller

Freelance Art Director

As a daughter of a German father and a Brazilian mother Manuela grew up in the South of Germany. After an uninspiring apprenticeship as a foreign languages correspondence clerk, she decided to study Visual Communication Arts at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden. She then went on to work as a designer for a new expresso brand in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Upon her return to Germany, Manuela started her own design business in Hamburg in 2006. Attracted by the vibrant, inspiring and international environment, Manuela joined Dekeyser&Friends as freelance Web & Graphic Designer.

She feels inspired by her hobbies such as running, singing, design & arts and cuisine.

Anne-Charlotte Dannacker

Team Coordinator

Lotte grew up in a small village close to Lüneburg, Germany. She studied Business Administration at the European Business Academy in Madrid and at the University of Mannheim. During her studies she worked for Continental, S.A. and Siemens, S.A. in Barcelona in the areas of Human Resources and Quality.

Lotte enjoys riding horses, running and dancing, as well as getting to know different countrys and cultures. She loves spending time with her family and taking rides in the nature accompanied by the two family dogs.

Maike Gosch

Content Manager

Maike grew up in Hamburg. She studied International Law in Hamburg and Aix-en-Provence as well as Literature and Philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin. After receiving her law degree in European and Media Law, she worked for several years as a media lawyer in Berlin, consulting film productions firms, musicians, artists and publishing houses. She then went on to work for several years in the film industry as a film producer, script editor and script writer and as editor and consultant for prestigious publishing houses. Aspiring to use storytelling as a tool to make good causes and important issues known, she has worked as a consultant for NGOs and social and ecological initiatives and lectured on this subject.

Maike loves all kinds of sports and cooking and is very happy that the foundation opened an office in her hometown of Hamburg.

Björn Hering

Head Cultural Program

Björn was born in Bern. He started his career as a TV and radio presenter at the age of 14 and worked for over seventeen TV shows in Switzerland. From the age of 18 on, he produced his own successful TV formats. He then studied business in Bern and trained to be a teacher. In 2001 he founded the Swiss TV production company FaroTV and lead a team of 35 employees as CEO. After having sold his company to the renowned Condor Films AG in Zurich, he served on the executive board of Condor Films AG for several years.

He left the company in 2008 and - after a well-deserved break traveling around Europe in a caravan - founded Mediafish GmbH, which creates innovative TV-Formats and Multimedia and Web films. His show "Joya runs" earned the "Rose d'or 2003" for "best interactive TV Show". Björn lives in Zurich and Murten with girlfriend and enjoys flying planes and acrobatics.

Florian Hoffmann

CEO

Florian is founding-CEO of the Dekeyser&Friends Foundation and an educator, political philosopher and social entrepreneur. Stemming from a German artist family, he grew up in Germany and Spain. Florian has worked as a freelance journalist, as a project manager in Asia, taught international politics classes, as well as organized conferences on the EU’s foreign policy in Germany, the US, the UK and Rumania. As a philosopher and political scientist he researched EU foreign policy and in 2009 co-founded the Brussels Actopia.eu think tank, before getting involved in the field of education and soon Dekeyser&Friends.

For many years, Florian played handball in Germany and the first British national league and has also played theatre in Berlin. Today, he lives in Hamburg with his wife.

Nathalie Hummer

Freelance Senior Art Director 

Nathalie is half Austrian and half Belgian. After finishing her tourism studies in Salzburg, Austria and working for a year at EuroDisney in Paris, she studied Graphic Design in Brisbane, Australia and Munich. After finishing her studies, she worked for six years with the editorial design legend Horst Moser in Munich. Amongst others, she received the Merit Award of the Society of Publication Designers, NY for her work during that time.

In 2003, Nathalie opened her own graphic studio but soon took on the development and management of the DEDON graphic-design department at the company’s headquarters in Lüneburg.
Since 2008, Nathalie is once again working as a freelance designer and took on the development of the visual identity of D&F. She lives in Hamburg, Germany with her boyfriend Olaf.

Sven–Erik Jost

Pro Bono Financial Advisor D&F Academy Hamburg 

Half German and half Norwegian Sven-Erik grew up in the Southwest of Germany. He trained to be an industrial management assistant and also became a certified management accountant. After successfully working in the energy sector for 10 years as the Head of Accounting and then went on to become the Finance Director of the DEDON Group.

Sven-Erik lives with his wife and their two children in Lüneburg and enjoys cooking and watching historical documentaries.

Katherin Kirschenmann

Strategy and Development Manager

Katherin has lived, studied and worked in Germany, Scotland and Latin America. She did a Bachelor in Philosophy and Economics on a scholarship from the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft and later graduated with a Masters degree in International Strategy and Economics from the University of St. Andrews. During her studies she focused on topics in the area of Development Economics and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Before joining the Dekeyser & Friends team she worked as a consultant for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants where she advised clients in the public as well as the business sector.

Katherin loves traveling and spent several months in Asia as well as Latin America where she worked in a volunteer project with kids in rural Nicaragua. She organized several conferences and events and gave lectures on development issues. Since she enjoys talking a lot she was founder and president of her University`s debating society.

Romy Krämer

Dreammaker Manager

Romy, born in the former German Democratic Republic, studied psychology in Leipzig. While researching collaboration among distributed teams in the oil industry at the University of Aberdeen, she developed a critical perspective on corporate social responsibility and decided to pursue a PhD project into that direction. After six months of traveling and volunteering in Ecuador, she joined the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, where she worked on her dissertation about anti-corporate activism and the formation of transnational advocacy networks. When not doing fieldwork on resistance against the mining and steel industry in India, she was active as one of the founding members of her University’s Greening the Campus Initiative.

Inspired by her work with Indian activists and social movements, she for now decided to quit formal academia and joined Dekeyser and Friends to explore alternatives to conventional education and develop the DreamMaker Program. Romy lives in Berlin and Hamburg, likes Ashtanga Yoga and electronic music.

Norbert Lösing

Pro Bono Legal Advisor

Norbert was born in 1964 and spent much of his childhood in Madrid. He went on to study law in Bayreuth and went for his postgraduate judicial service traineeship to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He subsequently worked as legal advisor and project manager for the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Venezuela and Argentine. He then taught at Heidelberg University and received a PhD from Bonn University. Since 2001 Norbert is Partner in the firm Sieper&Lösing.

For the foundation Norbert provides legal advice on a variety of issues. He lives with his wife Susanne and his three children in Lüneburg.

Marie Måwe

Development & Communications Manager

Marie grew up in the wilderness, snow and midnight sun of Swedish Lapland. While still at school, Marie founded Sweden’s most prominent anti-bullying organization. Later, curiosity led her to work as a truck assembler at Volvo Trucks and join the start-up of a diving business in Malta. Marie also managed the Youth Parliament in Sweden for over two years. Fascinated by people’s different worldviews she took a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology, languages and communication at the University of Gothenburg, and a Master’s Degree in international relations and development economics at Trento University in Italy. Despite her remote and lonely origin, international communication and societal engagement are the gold threads in her life and at Dekeyser & Friends she finds the ideal combination. 

Languages are Marie’s passion - she speaks five fluently - and she enjoys spending time with her over twenty dictionaries. When not seen on snow or water engaging in outdoor sports, Marie is the lead singer in a rockband, collecting money for hospitals and schools in Africa.

Andrew Mbambezeli

Project Coordinator

Andrew hails from Cape Town, South Africa. After receiving the prestigious First Rand Group scholarship, Andrew studied Business Science at the University of Cape Town, specializing in Finance and Accounting. He is currently finishing a Bachelor of Commerce in Management at the University of South Africa. During his studies, Andrew worked as a Production Manager in the photographic industry. Andrew is active in community projects and has been part of Habitat for Humanity for several years.

He enjoys traveling with his Danish girlfriend and any kind of adventure and endurance sport.

Alana Range

Content Editor

Alana was born in the Canadian mountains, but grew up in central Ontario. After studying journalism and philosophy in Ottawa, she packed her multimedia bags and moved to Brooklyn, New York. She has worked as an associate producer on feature-length documentaries, written stories for Discover Magazine, and produced multimedia for the Guggenheim, and the American Museum of Natural History. For two years, she produced a popular weekly science podcast series on pop culture science in New York. In 2010, Alana was a Fellow of the D&F Rehousing Project in the Philippines which inspired her to join the D&F team in Hamburg as the Content Editor for all Fellow media content.

Alana‘s inspired most by the colorful people she meets every day. She also loves a good book, a creative meal, and clever design.

Rouven Ramon Steinfeld

Program Manager D&F Academy Hamburg

Rouven grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied Liberal Arts in Berlin and Government , Diplomacy & Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, which he completed with distinction. Rouven studied for his Masters at the London School of Economics and Political Science researching the impact of US policy on UN peacekeeping under Presidents Bush senior and Clinton. He has also been active in competitive debate, and was a finalist and champion in Israeli national debate tournaments.

Rouven has worked in database development for the dsArt art gallery in Frankfurt and as a teaching assistant in a London school. He has been involved with a variety of voluntary projects, including organising an aid program for Sudanese refugees in Israel. In his spare time, Rouven is a keen actor and has both produced and acted in productions in Berlin and London. He also enjoys cooking, music, and getting to know his new hometown of Hamburg.

Robert Suppé

Freelance Communication Designer 

Robert grew up in Southern Gemany. He studied graphic design and then moved to Frankfurt where he set up the graphic design divison for a new TV channel. In 1999, he founded his own studio in Munich and was soon working for many companies and magazines. From 2007-2009, Robert worked at DEDON, in the end running the graphic design department. He is now working again as a freelancer in Hamburg and, together with Nathalie, develops the CI and multimedia elements for Dekeyser & Friends. Robert travels back and forth between Hamburg and Munich, the hometown of his son Paul.

Maret Voss

Project Coordinator 

Maret was born in Hamburg, Germany, but grew up near Frankfurt. After spending some time in the US as an Au Pair she studied European Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology and Religious Sciences. Following her studies, she spent 7 months in Ecuador to work in a project for street children. During her studies Maret started working for a popular international Social Enterprise in Hamburg and later became their Communication Manager. After working for this Social Business for three years, she decided to start her own company to support social initiatives in their content development, communication and execution. Maret is involved with D&F on a freelance basis and supports the implementation of our Inspiration Projects.

On a voluntary basis she organizes the socialbar Hamburg, a network and exchange platform of non- and for-profit projects as well as people from different business backgrounds (IT, Design, Education etc.). In this context she is also organizing the UrbanCamp, a 3 days conference in a barcamp format, which, once a year, brings together people interested in engaging in the social and environmental area.

János Winkler

Pro Bono Medical Advisor

János grew up in Berlin and discovered his passion for the miracle of the human body after his grandmother gave him three books on anatomy when he was 14. He went on to study Western and Chinese Medicine and has since returned to China many times to continue his studies of Oriental medicine. At the age of 32 he became chief physician at the TCM and Pain Clinic in Lüneburg. Since 1995 János publishes and lectures on issues such as Acupuncture and Pain Therapy. He teaches at the Institute for Music Therapy at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and was appointed professor there in 2006.

János advises the foundation on medical issues, especially regarding their health and safety in the projects worldwide. He now runs a private practice together with his wife, specializing in TCM, Pain Therapy and Regulative Medicine in Lüneburg where they live.