Walter Link

Chair of the AoF communication training and leadership retreat

Walter Link chairs the Global Academy (which supports social entrepreneurs with leadership training and coaching) and the Global Leadership Network (a community of senior leadership practitioners from around the world), which have partnered with Waldzell to offer this AoF Retreat. Walter Link also co-founded and co-led international business networks, which helped to develop the movement for corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSR) and related movements for social entrepreneurship and micro credit, fair trade and socially responsible investing (SRI).

These included the Social Venture Network (SVN) in Europe – the fi rst pan- European network for concerned business and social entrepreneurs, which also impacted EU and UN policy; and Empresa, which now includes twenty such organizations across the Americas. Walter also co-created the U.S.’s fi rst fully accredited MBA in Sustainable Management and many other leadership related programs around the world. In business, Walter was a partner of B.Grimm, a 130-year-old Asian – European group of industrial companies. After leaving B.Grimm to focus on societal and individual transformation, Walter was involved in companies pursuing social and environmental goals and managed an organic farm.

Walter’s social entrepreneurship reaches from the above examples to helping Human Rights Watch to create its European Union offi ce, from working with Greyston Foundation to support homeless and otherwise marginalized people, from doing psycho-spiritual work with people dying of AIDS to advising the United Nations leadership. His work in the world inspired 30 years of intense psychological and spiritual practice.

In working with leaders and social entrepreneurs from around the world, Walter increasingly combined his classical inner work training with a broad range of leadership practices to gradually develop an accessible and actionable approach through which action in the world benefi ts from the richness of eastern and western spiritual traditions, modern psychology and science.