Cynthia Ong

Cynthia Ong engages deeply in facilitating processes, partnerships and projects that provoke ecologically sustainable co-existence between groups, communities, regions, and realms.

Her experience over the past three decades has been in the fields of social entrepreneurship, organizational leadership, process design and facilitation, and project development, financing and implementation. With a passion for finding the creative tension and balance between process and task, Cynthia founded LEAP – Land Empowerment Animals People – which has helped birth multiple long-term partnerships, initiatives and organizations coalescing around systemic multi-sectoral processes and change.

Among these is Forever Sabah, the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah’s transition towards a diversified, equitable circular economy with the focal areas of food, agriculture and fisheries, forests, water and soil, infrastructure, energy and waste, livelihoods, tourism, and enterprise, and culture and arts.

Cynthia has more recently developed a keen interest in relational facilitation, which sees that “the crisis is relational” and focuses on the cracks, chasms and divides as the space in which to nurture relational capacity within the chaos and opportunity of complexity.