realife people
Justice work in this sector usually runs on project funding, short consultancy contracts, transactional relationships, and boundaried organisations - with the people doing the work treated as resource to be drawn on and moved past. realife strives to move away from this.
Four people hold its centre, joined by a wider community of associates and partnerships who are in sustained relationship with the collective rather than passing through it.
Intentional community
Four people hold the centre of realife: Jane Burt, Ludwig Chanyau, Alex Pretari and Finn Woodhill. Leadership is held collectively, they work at an equal flat rate across everything they do because realife cannot advocate for fair compensation across the sector while reproducing wage hierarchies inside itself. Decisions on direction, partnerships and finances are made by the four together.
Jane Burt, PhD
Co-leads on: storytelling & learning, strategy & care
An eco-feminist evaluator, educator and researcher, Jane has spent twenty-five years working at the meeting point of transformative learning, gender and environmental justice, and evaluation built for complex systems. Her practice runs from community organisations and movements to international funders, and she brings arts-based and emancipatory approaches to work that most evaluation flattens.
Ludwig Chanyau, PhD
Co-leads on: partnerships & associates, storytelling & learning
Ludwig is a development professional specialising in just transitions, community resilience, and systems-level research and evaluation. He works with multilateral organisations and civil society on climate adaptation, food systems, and economic justice. His expertise includes the design of research and MEAL frameworks, evidence generation, impact measurement, and translating complex findings into actionable strategies.
Alex(ia) Pretari
Co-leads on: strategy & care, finance & operations
Alex is passionate about working collaboratively towards socio-environmental justice and post-capitalist future(s). Her research, evaluation and facilitation work is particularly attentive to power and to how structural inequalities are reproduced and might be challenged. Trained in statistics and economics, she has moved from quantitative impact evaluation toward values-based and feminist learning practice, working with funders, movements and NGOs on more reciprocal ways of holding power and resources.
Finn Woodhill
Co-leads on: finance & operations, partnerships & associates
Finn is an educator activist whose work focuses on process, narrative and frameworks that enable justice. With a background in community development in the UK, he works across INGOs, movements, leadership development and partnership building. What drives the work is a post-organisational future where the labour of justice is truly recognised and recompensed.
Associates
realife's associates are based across southern Africa, Europe and a range of countries globally. They are part of the collective, not a roster of subcontractors brought in to deliver and sent away. They are people who want to do justice work differently, whose values and politics sit close to others in the collective, and who choose to be in ongoing relationship with realife rather than passing through it on a single contract.
Associates bring opportunities, shape proposals, help set direction, and carry realife's ways of working into their own organisations and contexts.
The relationship runs both ways: realife holds the same accountability to its associates as it asks of them, and is itself an associate in many of these relationships. What each person contributes and receives is worked out together at the start, as with any partnership realife builds. All kinds of knowledge, relationships and skills are valued, without the usual prioritising of academic credentials and high cash-value networks.