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About

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HERO

About me

My goal is to build the facilitation muscle for organisations that care about the quality of work and the needs of their teams.

I want to help teams get off the meeting treadmill, convene with purpose, and do complex things with care.

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Whys
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Why do I care?

I love working in remote and collaborative teams. To me it is a freeing and clarifying way to work. It requires transparency, goal orientation, ritual, and clear communication. Meaningful collaboration in remote teams can create flexible, people-centred, and impactful work places. But without care and attention that’s not what happens most of the time.

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Why is so much remote work a slog?

Building a good remote work culture takes a special kind of leadership and system-building. As teams diversify and settle into remote and hybrid structures, there is a missing ingredient: facilitation. Sometimes you need an expert facilitator to hold space. But what about the rest of the time? Facilitation capability isn’t a nice-to have — it is a core competency of any effective organisation. I want to help you and your team build the muscle to convene with competence and care.

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Helping you move forward 👉

💪 Want to improve your remote facilitation skills? Check out our trainings.

🎬 Need support for events, team conversations, or organisational change? Check out our services.

💌  Want to sign up for a weekly newsletter about facilitation? Sign up here.

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🌈 A little more about me

I live with my partner and toddler in Athens, Greece spending time on the water, next to the water, and under the water. I also spend time nerding out about sociotechnical issues and staring into the middle distance thinking about the role that technology plays in social progress and political systems.

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What people say about working with me ✨

“In my 30 years of work, I've never seen a more skilled and intuitive facilitator than Alix. Her planning focuses on deeply understanding the needs of the individuals and creating the right amount of structure to work with what emerges when they come together as a group. Onsite, she holds the group dynamic with what seems like few words and little effort, but with remarkable effectiveness. She is attuned to what's said and unsaid, and to the interplay between the rational and the emotional, and the result is practical, real-world value. An event is a huge investment of time, money, and attention. Hiring Alix was the single best decision we made in support of a great return on that investment. I hope I get the chance to work with her many more times.”

Jen Pahlka, Founder at Code for America and former Deputy CTO of the US Government

Alix is an absolute gem. When we worked with her to facilitate our event, she listened deeply to what we were trying to accomplish, and used her deep knowledge of communities and conversations to build a flow for the event that not only hit all the right notes on the topic, but also really took into consideration the breadth of feelings and experiences that people were bringing with them. I already can't wait to work with Alix again!

Mark Lerner, Partnership for Public Service

“I’ve worked with Alix on several projects, and every time she has been a phenomenal thought partner. She always takes the necessary time to prepare and orient to the problem at hand, and then finds ways to work through the problem, approaching it from a new angle, and drawing on her own expertise to make the problem tractable. Alix has helped us solve problems involving complex team dynamics and the challenges of mission-driven teams. Whether providing expert perspectives on technology and justice or tackling complex organizational challenges, Alix is an exciting and inspiring partner to work with.”

Madeleine Clare Elish, Senior Research Scientist at Google

“Alix is a facilitation machine – a unique combination of intuition, intellect and supreme organisational skills. I would trust any conversation in her care, from the high level strategy ones, to the weedy interpersonal ones. She helps groups deepen their trust, hone their analysis and grow their confidence in having difficult but vital conversations to be able to increase their impact in the world.”

Tanya O'Carroll

“Alix is one of the best facilitators we’ve ever worked with, I can’t recommend her highly enough. She is super thoughtful and always creates an inclusive, exciting and dynamic space. Alix’s support in the run up to our session was invaluable. She led us expertly through the preparation and thought that was required for an online event with this purpose and size.”

Martha Dark, Director at Foxglove

“Alix held space for the whole team, enabling every team member to give genuine and honest feedback. At the end of the project we were able to clearly recognise the achievements we’d made, and we were left with a framework for holding similar project retros once Alix had gone.”

Seyi Akiwowo, CEO at Glitch

“Meaningful change stems from open and honest conversation about difficult topics, and there is no one more skilled at facilitating those exchanges than Alix. I have personally experienced Alix facilitate conversations between parties who entered the room as skeptical adversaries and left with a sense of understanding and willingness to engage.”

Andrew Strait, formerly Policy and Partnerships team at DeepMind

“Bringing divergent perspectives together on important and often controversial topics is a critical aspect of our work at the Partnership on AI. Alix has been a significant partner in providing expert facilitation for priority projects and training for our entire program staff. Working with Alix has enabled us to develop a cohesive approach to facilitation, and ensure our convenings are highly productive and valuable.”

Julia Davis, Director of Partnerships at Partnerships on AI

“Alix helps clients think through the purpose of organizing, how to achieve that purpose, and how to do so in a way that is collaborative, equitable, and powerful.”

J. Nathan Matias, Assistant Professor at Cornell University

“Alix is wicked smart. She understands the psychology that motivates individuals, the bureaucracies that guide and weigh down institutions. She also foresees the unintended consequences when changes are made within a network or system. These multiple perspectives make Dunn a deft leader and collaborator whether one-on-one or working within an established institution.”

David Sasaki, Program Officer at Hewlett Foundation

“Working with Alix has transformed the way I feel about initiating complex meetings. She has time and again demonstrated her capacity to curate thoughtful agendas, build trust among participants and manage complex interests, and funnel them into actionable, united outcomes. Alix is flexible and creative while facilitating, always ensures participants feel safe, respected and heard, and is an expert at surfacing tensions that need to be addressed. She is patient yet outcome-driven. I have absolute trust in Alix – she has eliminated the stress I used to feel organising meetings with complicated elements.”

Hannah Draper, Information Program, Open Society Foundations

Lovely organizations I have worked with 💪
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💌 Want to dig deeper?

Sign up for my weekly newsletter 🏝 The Archipelago to get ideas and techniques to improve your skills and help you see remote collaboration in new ways. I offer subscribers office hours, exercises, and I share what I’m learning as I facilitate events and really hard conversations.