About

About the Gaia Partnership
Christopher Sewell - Gaia

Christopher Sewell

CEO and  founder of The Gaia Partnership.

Email: chris@gaiapartnership.com
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Having spent his working life in the world of marketing communications in a wide range of organizations he formed Gaia in late 2007. From London to the East coast of Australia and from China to Taiwan Chris has an intimate knowledge of all aspects of operational areas associated with operational, advertising and other marketing services.

The driving force behind forming Gaia was the explosion of businesses claiming ‘Carbon neutrality’ as a marketing position while not understanding that carbon measurement and reduction should be the focus.  Carbon offsets and neutrality should be the last step after reducing consumption as far as possible. Chris has a passion for the reducing carbon emissions in the businesses he knows.

Completed GRI Certified Training

Chris is available as a professional speaker/panel member. Recent events include:

  • “Transactional Level Carbon measurement in Printing” Litho Institute of Australia (LIA), Sydney February 2011
  • “The Benefits of Measuring Carbon Emissions in Direct Marketing” ADMA lunch Marriott Hotel Brisbane June 2010
  • The effect of Carbon Emissions on Marketing Communications. Breakfast seminar to Federal Government Canberra, March 2009
  • TrinityP3 “Budget Maximisation Workshops “How operational efficiency is wedded to environmental best practice” Sydney & Melbourne February 2009
  • “Developing a greener digital media across a multi channel strategy”. Green Media Conference Boston, October 2008
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Tom Bender

Professional Services and Channels

Email: tom@gaiapartnership.com
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Tom has been part of the Gaia team for over ten years. He leads the Professional Services and Channels Program for the business. Tom is a dedicated and proven business operation and commercialisation specialist who leads teams in the Asia Pacific to analyse business operations and implement CO2Counter technology so they can drive carbon and complexity from operations. Tom is an adept change agent who can skillfully embed Gaia’s CO2Counter solutions in client organizations to enable data-driven decision making, render carbon footprint reduction, and ROI modeling using data from disparate sources. This helps clients achieve sustainable under target carbon management. In addition to this Tom has spent much of his career commercialising and monetising technology solutions and channel strategies, several of them in the AIML space. This experience and skill set uniquely places Tom in the role of both a client-facing “doer” and a value creation services and channel “builder” for the Gaia Partnership.

Advisory Panel

Darren Woolley

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Darren is a scientist, who got into advertising as a copywriter and ended up a creative director. After 15 years in advertising he realised when applied beyond simply the promotions function and managed effectively, marketing provides organisations with the opportunity to deliver a competitive advantage through innovation, resulting in company growth.

In 2000 Darren established TrinityP3 as an independent marketing management consulting company that applies scientific analytics to the marketing process.

Ben Middleton

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After 7 years with Westpac managing mobile apps and product development, Ben founded IRL Education who work with Year 10 and 11 students to deliver skills, ideas and advice for life after the HSC.
He has an in-depth understanding of the transformative nature of the digital environment and an appreciation of the social and environmental challenges that face the world today.

Michael Vamos

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Michael enjoys and has demonstrated success partnering with senior management and Boards to design and execute well defined corporate strategy across a range of service industries including technology, professional services, biotech and petrochemical. Mike has strong communication skills and a commitment to mentoring multi-function direct reports in a fast paced agile environment. Michael is extremely motivated to lead change and achieve corporate objectives through business growth.

Phillip Lawrence

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Currently looking at a number of new extremely high tech environmental technologies that are working on significant environmental problems such as water contamination, waste plastic and food waste. Each of these areas are very interesting and concerning.
For many parts of the world water is a greater problem than CO2 emissions. But it is not a simple matter of filtering water, the pollution is at a chemical level.  
Plastics are probably the most complex ecological problems to understand. It has global significance and the problem is made worse because of the diversity of types of plastics which make recycling and easy word but difficult task.

Georgina O’Kane

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Georgina’s experience  has been gained  across a variety of industries with some of Australia’s best-known companies. She has been instrumental in implementing significant transformational changes and have the skills to take complex projects from design to successful implementation.

Utilising her strong communication and leadership skills together with a pragmatic, collaborative, business focused approach, Georgina has delivered change across many aspects of business including outsourcing, cost out, PMOs, major programs of work, innovation, processes and controls, major bank integration and IT operations.

Georgina has managed operational budgets up to $600m with capital budgets up to $100m and teams of over 80 people.

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