Rebecca Petzel

Groupaya

I was the first employee under the talented partnership of Eugene Eric Kim and Kristin Cobble at Groupaya. Groupaya helps groups — be they teams, organizations, networks, or nations — more skillfully work together to create their desired future.

I had the opportunity to consult on extensive engagements with a diversity of clients. We designed participatory culture change experiments for large corporations, helped new start-ups align and activate around strategies, and facilitated a multi-stakeholder engagement around the future of California’s water supply.

I learned a tremendous amount with and from our clients around how to design engagements that help activate groups to reach their collective potential. But I learned even more from Eugene Eric Kim and Kritin Cobble in the work we did setting up Groupaya, trying to practice what we preach to be a learning, adaptive, flexible organization that helps bring the world alive.

HUB : CREATE

At SOCAP12, I worked with the HUB Bay Area team to design and facilitate the HUB : CREATE track.

We designed HUB : CREATE to be a platform that moves conference attendees beyond handshakes and introductions, deepening their relationships by sharing ideas and working together. The primary goal was to help shift the conference from a one off event into an activating opportunity that drove meaningful impact throughout the year. You can watch my plenary introduction above.

It was built on the user-generated unconference format, allowing attendees to propose and host their own, participatory conference sessions. We updated the format by making HUB : CREATE a hosted experience. Hosts helped create a generative environment and supported the group uncovering opportunities for collective action.

People Powered Capital

At the 3rd annual SOCAP conference I curated the people powered capital track. The Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) is the premier convening of investors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers working at the intersection of money and meaning.

As track curator, I worked closely with our lead sponsor MicroPlace to design a series of discussions and experiences throughout the conference that explored how democratizing trends are transforming the way we access financial, physical, and social capital. You can see our teaser for the conference track below.

Myoo Create

I was on the founding team at Myoo Create. At Myoo, the motto was nobody is as smart as everybody, which is why we hosted the first open innovation community 100% dedicated to environmental and social change. We worked with organizations to open up their environmental and social challenges to a passionate community of do-gooders.

In classic entrepreunerial style, I served as a jack of all trades at Myoo: from helping to build the initial business plan, to building and managing our community outreach strategy (17,000 active members in just a few months), to designing and managing challenges with high profile clients like Levi Strauss & Co.

I’d encourage you to read all about it in my Fast Company interview about the Care to Air Challenge we designed and hosted for Levi’s.

Collaboration Ninjas

During a year in Sweden, my two thesis mates and I turned from mild-mannered graduate students to (somewhat) serious ninjas trying to master the arts of collaboration.

This is really where it all began. Our thesis explored “Collaboration for sustainability in a networked world.”

We were privileged to interview thinkers and doers from across the globe. But perhaps the most important learning we had was studying ourselves. We were working collaboratively, and attempted to share our studies and learnings along the way. Along the way, I met an amazing and unexpected community of ninjas. I was hooked.