Cynthia Rayner

Cynthia Rayner is a researcher, practitioner, writer, and lecturer. Cynthia is currently affiliated with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business as an adjunct lecturer & senior researcher. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, University of Oxford, Said Business School. Her research focuses on collective agency and how organizations and communities work together to shape social systems.

Cynthia’s work in social change began when, as a recovering management consultant, she joined the LGT Impact Fellowship, which brought her to South Africa for over a decade. Most recently, Cynthia led the Systems Storytelling Initiative at the Collective Change Lab, bringing together a diverse group of storytellers from across the globe to understand how to better communicate stories of systems change. Cynthia also served as lead facilitator for the DGMT Fellowship for Organisational Innovation, a program supporting civil society leaders in Cape Town, South Africa. She has held roles in several organizations, including Generation Ubuntu, an afterschool program educating children living with HIV in Cape Town; mothers2mothers, an African social enterprise employing women to guide other women to good health; and the Starfish Greathearts Foundation, a nonprofit supporting children and families in South Africa.

Cynthia's passion is finding "stories from the edge" that reveal the power of people in collectives. She recently co-authored a book, The Systems Work of Social Change, which was awarded the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s Terry McAdam Book Award for “Changing the Way We Think” in 2022.

Cynthia began her career working in the corporate sector as a management consultant. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MBA from INSEAD, and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Cape Town. She lives in Houston, Texas.