Stefan founded Impact Up, the institute for systemic impact orientation, in 2026. Until 2025 he spent six years as an adviser for planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) in the Civil Peace Service (CPS) of GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) in Cambodia. There he gathered practical experience in impact orientation with a CPS programme, with international experts and eight very diverse partner organisations. In peace and dealing-with-the-past work, project impact was always part of a programme impact of the CPS and at the same time part of the impact of the partner organisations – an international tribunal, psychological service providers, memorial sites, youth movements, universities. Capacity development was often a core element, and project impact not seldom organisational development as well. Here he learned how complexity in systems can be met with appreciation – and how that keeps options for action open.
The whole CPS programme was connected with the other CPS programmes in Cambodia, so that impact on the country as a whole was equally intended; and not least there were many further PME advisers in the CPS of GIZ in other countries, who regularly reflected on methods, structure and ways of working. In this way Stefan brought numerous actors in the field in Cambodia into resonance with one another and strengthened a network of people active for peaceful coexistence. Methods from peace work itself, from conflict transformation for instance, came into such planning and reflection workshops again and again, as did his experience as a yoga teacher and from Nonviolent Communication.
Since returning to Germany, Stefan has been working intensively on theories and methods for how participation and co-creation can genuinely be realised, on systemic approaches and a systemic stance. Numerous authors offer a space to reflect on the material he brought back from his time in Cambodia. Since December 2025 he has been deepening this in the training as a systemic organisational developer at WISPO. Literature on Systems Change and on co-creation has created a lot of resonance. With Impact Up he now takes the methods for planning, monitoring and reflecting together with the methods of peace work – dialogue, conflict transformation, dealing with the past and with trauma – into systemic practice, and develops approaches for systemic impact orientation aimed at changing society. Context-specific, with the empathy and the sense of what it takes to truly hear, see and feel what is at stake.
Thematically, Stefan brings a broad background from his time before the peace work in Kosovo and Cambodia – from economics and international studies at university. Many years of change work with social-ecological movements, above all for a basic income and degrowth, have shaped him as well. For the Climate Service Center in Hamburg he produced a literature review on the evaluation of the co-creation of knowledge – quality criteria, indicators and methods for it, compiled from around a hundred inter- and transdisciplinary research papers. Above all the idea that the participation of different perspectives matters in every phase of a collaboration is something Stefan has carried forward ever since. The work fed into the 2017 publication Evaluating co-creation of knowledge: from quality criteria and indicators to methods. And in nearly every role he has initiated and organised events again and again – from small festivals through extensive trainings to large conferences.
