Behind the project - Lea Suter
Professional experience
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I currently work for the think and do tank Pro Futuris where I am in charge of developing dialog formats to counter polarization within our society. Previously I worked as Secretary-General of the UN Association Switzerland and before that as Vice Director of the think tank foraus - Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy. I repeatedly worked for the United Nations Office at Geneva, first as a Coordinator of the cultural activities which we organized together with the UN member states and later as the Head Project Manager of the large-scale event "UN Open Day".
I am active in various pacifist organizations and since November 2020 the Founding President of the Forum for a Culture of Peace / Forum für Friedenskultur. I am passionate about moderation, project design or ideation processes related to the topic of peace.
For more information please check out my Linkedin profile.
Educational background
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I hold a Bachelor in German and Russian language and culture (University of Lausanne) and a Master in Russian-German cultural transfer studies (Freiburg and Moscow). I took several courses in mediation and national dialogue, cultural diplomacy, facilitation methods, videography, journalism and communication. I am enrolled in a continuous education programme in Multitrack Peace Mediation (Inmedio, Berlin) and in a 4-years programme in Interreligious Meditation (Meditation Schweiz). Languages: German, English, Russian, French, Spanish
Personal motivation
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I was lucky to have been given a generous portion of optimism and unlimited renewable curiosity. I am one of those people who like finding and inventing new things, breaking out of routines and one’s comfort zone and I am a fan of putting obstacles in my way with the goal to climb them afterwards.
I wish us a world in which people consider themselves as part of a larger whole and where different cultures and clusters would base their way of thinking and their actions less on the differences and more on their common points.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. »
(Albert Einstein, Interview 1929)
"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Der Mensch mit sich alleine, 1878)
You have probably been taught that you have five fingers. But what is important (to understand the finger are not the fingers themselves, but the relations between them.
(Gregory Bateson, An ecology of Mind)
"Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.”
(Max Frisch, Stiller, 1954!)
"People put limitations on their creativity, believing they have to rely on what they know and what they have done. (...)
Free is not the one who can do what he wants, but the one who can think what he wants."
(Bertrand Piccard, Face your Fears, 2015)
„Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Vaceslav Havel
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