Team

Get to know us: the Can Cet Foundation team

To make up its Board of Trustees, Can Cet Foundation has brought together people with outstanding professional careers who understand from their own experience the value of following inner paths to progress with satisfactory personal growth. They are all committed to the mission of bringing people closer and facilitating knowledge of different methods to achieve overall wellbeing.

Members of the Board of Trustees of the Can Cet Foundation

Jorge is a social entrepreneur who founded Can Cet in 1995 to promote the inclusion into the labour market of people at risk of social exclusion, whilst offering high-quality services. The company has made every effort to turn this social enterprise into a benchmark project in the sector over the years, and into a main operator of services in Catalonia, a pioneer in Spain in implementing the Balance Sheet of the Economy for the Common Good.

Jorge is a somewhat atypical or unusual businessman; he has followed the self-taught route in his professional development, allowing him to travel through introspective and personal territories. His training lies in different disciplines enabling him to design a more holistic vision of his business plan. The project has matured into an enterprise that considers all areas of its people beyond just employment.

This was his rationale when he founded the Can Cet Foundation, a project intended to open up spaces and paths for people to fully develop. “It is my desire for this project to benefit as many people as possible across different disciplines; living education, personal and spiritual growth, and support in disciplines designed for personal improvement, thereby creating a more prosperous and conscious society.”

Olga holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Barcelona. Her path through the world of scientific research has always been accompanied by a deep desire for personal and spiritual growth.

After spending 7 years in geochemical research at the University of Bristol (England), she has worked as an environmental consultant and project manager in Spain.

Trained as a craniosacral therapist by the Craniosacral Therapy Educational Trust (London), with the intention of accompanying the process of healing people from a loving and compassionate perspective. Her introspective research culminated in study and practice of Kadampa Buddhism, with her having studied on the Teacher Training Programme at the Mahakaruna Centre (Barcelona) since 2018. With regard to her interest in Living Education, since the birth of her daughter Abril in 2013 Olga has became interested in a respectful parenting model. She set up a parenting group called “El Bosque de las Caracolas” in Poblenou (Barcelona), along with other families interested in this way of accompanying early childhood. Over the years she has deepened her knowledge of and commitment to this educational model.

Joan is an industrial engineer, and his career started off in multinational companies and later as a freelance consultant. He believes in alternative economic models that put people at the centre of all economic activity.

His interest in social issues began after meeting people living in countries where they did not have the same opportunities as himself. He realised that the problem was not how much money one has, but rather a lack of opportunities to develop a life project and mission. These experiences led him to set up an association with a group of like- minded people to carry out small-scale development cooperation. In his working life, he has also led efforts to help companies work with greater awareness and respect for the environment.

Joan is committed to disseminating the model of the Economy for the Common Good (ECG), and at Can Cet he helps ensure that all activities take the social good into consideration.

Carmen is an economist and holds an MBA. She has always sought to give her life great meaning through professional development, with a solid education at ESADE and HEC Paris, as well as a great deal of ambition. She worked in Paris at one of the main French auditing firms Mazars, and later returned to Barcelona where she worked intensively in various financial institutions like Banco Central Hispano, Santander and Caixabank, soon taking on managerial and team management responsibilities.

She has reconciled her hectic professional life with the creation of a home and bringing up her two children. She is very grateful for this “life project” and feels it has helped her improve as a person.

The challenge of reconciling her personal and professional life, difficulties with stress management, finding it difficult to be happy even though she had everything she wanted, etc. generated an intense feeling of confusion and discontentment that prompted her to seek out meditation and Buddhist philosophy in 2011 through the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). Thanks to these teachings and practices, she has learned to cultivate inner peace, has trained both as a practitioner and as a teacher of meditation, and based on her own experience she trusts in this method as a way to adopt a positive and virtuous mental attitude. Her activities, her work and her relationships are now full of meaning, making her feel very fortunate.

Board of Directors of the Can Cet Foundation

As a social worker with over 20 years of experience in the social and third sector, Crisanta has developed her career in the world of job placement schemes for people with functional diversity and in the field of elderly people and residences. As the Head of the Social Area of the company Can Cet since 2019, she currently approaches the Can Cet Foundation project with great enthusiasm and a desire to expand the Foundation’s scope of action to help people develop in a global dimension.

Crisanta is committed to training and retraining people as the main tool for job placement, and is an expert in conflict management, talent management, equality opportunities, and coaching tools.

To make up its Board of Trustees, Can Cet Foundation has brought together people with outstanding professional careers

Can Cet Foundation Ambassadors

The Can Cet Foundation has the support and commitment of its Ambassadors, people socially recognized for their professional and personal merits, who identify with the mission, vision and values for which we work daily.
The distinction of Ambassadors is due to the fact that, for us, these figures are a fundamental pillar in our activity; They altruistically help us spread our purpose and, as opinion leaders and thanks to their values shared with the Foundation, they participate and get involved in this social project.
Their impeccable career and, especially, their vision and philosophy of life in accordance with the purposes of the Can Cet Foundation, make them socially committed people and figures capable of promoting messages for change in each of the Foundation work areas: personal growth, education, social inclusion and economic transformation.

If you would also like to support the Can Cet Foundation, contact us. Together we can do great things.

Christian Escribà, acclaimed pastry chef, is in the words of the best chef in the world, Ferran Adrià, a truly transversal and global creative, who uses the sweet world as a language to express himself. Due to family saga, this has been the universe where Christian has created his original world, in constant evolution. Considered the best pastry chef in Spain by the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy, he belongs to the 4th generation of a saga dedicated to pastry. His family business, after more than a hundred years of dedication to the art of baking, has become a historic Barcelona establishment. He is also a member of the Culinaire Academy of France, a lecturer in many countries, a member of the jury in the final of the World Chocolate Masters and a successful television presenter, with programs such as “Bogeria a la Pastisseria”, on TV3 and “Niquelao”, on the Netflix platform. He is also the author of the books ‘El arte de convertir la pastelería en ilusión’ and ‘La cocina de Peter Pan’.

Proudly married to Patricia Schmidt, the best specialist in the world in the preparation of sugar flowers and other forms of English pastry, he feels that they make a team that allows them to create small moments of joy and happiness in people.

For Christian Escribà, this is his main motivation. He works on a personal level every day to cherish others and wish for their happiness. Since connecting with Buddhism, he feels he has found the path to serenity and balance, which is why he studies and practices the teachings of the New Kadampa Tradition under the guidance of master Gesche Kelsang Gyatso and his teacher in Barcelona, Gen Kelsang Lochani.

Dancer and choreographer, Cesc Gelabert is a Barcelona native with a long national and international career of recognized prestige in the world of contemporary dance, becoming one of its most influential figures and receiving numerous awards, such as the Catalan Dance Prize, the Ciudad of Barcelona award, the Gold Medal in Cultural Merit of the city of Barcelona, the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, the National Dance Award, the Max Awards, The Herald 2004 Angel Award, or the DAAD Berlin, among others.

Gelabert Azzopardi, the dance company he created with his partner Lydia Azzopardi, has been an associate or resident company of the Teatro Libre in Barcelona and co-resident of the Hebbel Theater in Berlin.

Cesc Gelabert has always understood dance as a service to society, both in the specific field of art and in life in general, working so that it is incorporated into the core of education, since for him dance consists of inhabiting the body with emotion and mind. Beyond the artistic world, he has always had a great interest in social work and helping people in their personal and spiritual growth. “In itself, the action of dancing is meaningless, it does not give meaning to life. Sense is provided by something internal: an inner conviction or direction.” After trying many paths, in the mid-nineties he found Buddhism with the help of his teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, founder of the New Kadampa Tradition, who helped him find greater meaning in dance and life in general, making him a path of personal growth and service to others.

Team

Get to know us: the Can Cet Foundation team

Members of the Board of Trustees of the Can Cet Foundation

Jorge León García

Olga Riba Tort

Joan Martínez González

Carmen Tomás Pellejero

Board of Directors of the Can Cet Foundation

Crisanta Rodríguez Lavado

To make up its Board of Trustees, Can Cet Foundation has brought together people with outstanding professional careers

Can Cet Foundation Ambassadors

Christian Escribà

Cesc Gelabert