Our Founders
A Moment of Turning
SDG CoLab is an international non-profit collaboratory founded in 2016 in Geneva by Barbara Bulc.
It was created in response to the urgent need for cultural and systems transformation that places trust, care, and the wellbeing of people and planet before unlimited economic growth.
Our work is inspired by visionary thinkers whose ideas continue to shape our approach, including:
- Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1967)
- Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972)
- Joanna Macy, The Dharma of Natural Systems (1991)
Guided by these foundations and by diverse wisdom traditions across cultures, our mission is to help cultivate a society that flourishes in harmony with natural systems. We bring people, communities and institutions together to explore new ways of living, leading, and acting for a regenerative future.
We are grateful to our Founding Board members, Jeremy Lack, Lina Beaurain and to Board members and advisors Adi Constantin Gavrila, Olivier Kaeser, Martin Heller, Friedrich Hinterberger, and Janot Mendler de Suarez for their continuous support.
SDG CoLab is a home for collaboration, experimentation, and collective leadership toward a more coherent and life-sustaining world.
Barbara's Story
Barbara Bulc founded SDG CoLab out of a lifelong commitment to caring for people and the Earth. Growing up where the Southern Alps meet the Northern Mediterranean Sea, she was reaised in a lineage of love. Even as a child, she felt deeply connected to a larger Earth community shaped by these same values.
In her late twenties, she found herself leading the New York office of the Slovenian pharmaceutical company KRKA. It was there that she first confronted a difficult truth: even in healthcare, profit was often placed above care. Something in her knew this was profoundly wrong, yet it seemed widely accepted as “normal.”
This realization set her on a new path.
She left the corporate world to explore more meaningful ways of contributing to the common good. One turning point was her work with the Clinton Foundation on the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, where she learned what becomes possible when people collaborate across sectors and cultures toward shared goals.
She dedicated her life to creating social structures—and a new kind of social chemistry—that prioritizes the wellbeing of people, other species, and the planet. She believe that caring relationships, trust, and collaborative leadership are essential foundations for any society that hopes to flourish.
Her academic background includes chemistry and social sciences from the University of Ljubljana, and business leadership studies at Columbia Business School and the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. These institutions offered important knowledge, but over time she had to undergo a process of unlearning—opening to other ways of knowing grounded in embodied awareness, systems thinking, and wisdom traditions.
Over the past decade, she has studied and practiced meditation in Buddhist and other contemplative lineages. Her teachers include Jon Kabat-Zinn, Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche, Roshi Joan Halifax, Llewelyn and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. She has been shaped by systems thinker Fritjof Capra, eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, and cultural philosopher David Abram, among others.
Across all these experiences, one conviction has grown stronger: embodied awareness and new forms of storytelling are essential to our personal and collective transformation.