About

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Cheryl Gladu has a very particular set of skills. Many moons ago, she received a degree in International Business from Carleton University and an MBA from Simon Fraser University.  After working for several years in the trenches of the environmental movement, she co-created and managed an upstart green real estate development company. She was the development side of a team who realized the first Net zero triplex in Canada (possibly further afield than that). A few years ago she returned to school in order to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD in the innovative interdisciplinary INDI program at Concordia University, where she studies at both the John Molson School of Business and the Department of Design and Computation Arts. She has lectured at McGill, Concordia and Thompson Rivers Universities on topics related to entrepreneurship, society, design, and business. For fun she paints dystopic landscapes, manages hives of venomous insects and produces podcasts - first the Worlds We Want and currently the SpokenWeb podcast.

Cheryl’s main field of interest is design that facilitates collective behavior change. This includes the design of democratic organizations and effective collaborative  processes.  She has studied design for sustainable behavior change, via something called “ecofeedback,” as well as art for social change. 

Her thesis, a project called “The Good Fight,” focuses on dialogue as a desingerly practice for collaboration and a central feature of successfully completed of cohousing communities in Canada. While writing her thesis she also became an affiliate of Cohousing Solutions 500 Communities Program, because she likes to mix a certain degree of practice with her theory.