social entrepreneurship
Nafeez Ahmed leading a workshop organised by the Crisis Forum, hosted by the St Ethelburgas Centre for Peace & Reconciliation, on what can be done to avoid climate change violence
“One of the most illuminating voices in the British media.”
Catalysing change
Nafeez Ahmed is a C-Suite executive who has held senior leadership roles in a range of organisations, as well as founded his own ventures for social good. Currently he is Director of The Futures Lab at Unitas Communications Ltd, and founding Executive Director of the System Shift Lab, a consultancy working on humanity’s biggest global challenges.
He founded the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) in 2000 as an independent interdisciplinary volunteer-run think-tank analysing causes and solutions to interconnected global crises. He ran the IPRD as Executive Director until 2013. Through his work at the IPRD, which brought together researchers and academics from a variety of natural and social sciences, he developed the framework for what he called the 'Crisis of Civilization', culminating in the publication of his book A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the accompanying documentary feature film, The Crisis of Civilization. This was the first social science systems framework to understand the interconnections of climate, energy, food, economy, terrorism, and militarisation as features of a single global system. The IPRD's research-base and intellectual property was folded into Nafeez's new consultancy, the System Shift Lab.
From 2009 to 2010, Nafeez was Director of Strategy for Creative Education at Arts Versa, an arts and media consultancy working to build bridges between different ethnic and faith communities. He developed creative educational programmes, events and initiatives with a range of clients and stakeholders including Creative Partnerships, the UK government’s flagship creative learning programme from 2002 to 2011, the UK Department for Communities & Local Government, the US Embassy in London, the Mayor of London, the City of London Police, the Arts Council of England, the Dutch Embassy in London, and the conflict resolution charity, Forward Thinking.
From 2011 to 2013, he was Chief Research Officer at Unitas Communications, a cross-cultural communications agency. He rejoined Unitas as Senior Account Director from 2016 to 2017, before becoming Unitas’ Director of Strategic of Communications until 2020. He managed client accounts and projects at Unitas involving the United Nations Alliance for Civilizations, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, the Chairman of Lightsource Renewable Energy, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the League of Arab States, the Said Foundation's Amal Project, the US State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), Pakistan’s Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN), the NFL, among others.
From 2011 to 2013, he was Co-Director of The Concordia Forum, an exclusive trans-Atlantic Western Muslim leaders network, where he helped organise several annual leadership retreats, in particular designing their seminar and workshop components.
In 2014, Nafeez became founding CEO and editor-in-chief of INSURGE intelligence, a 100% reader-funded investigative journalism venture, where he developed a new framework for an applied collective intelligence process.
In 2016, Nafeez founded and convened Perennial, a nonprofit Western Muslim research collective developing online Islamic theological resources to counter violent, divisive and regressive narratives. Perennial was recently praised as a "leading counter narrative website", which is "well-designed, [has] appropriate content, and [is] easy to navigate" by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.