Kirsten
Heukels

Kirsten founded 1for2 Social Innovation in 2000, after years of working in leadership environments where she kept noticing the same pattern: technical competence was rarely the bottleneck. People were. Communication, trust, the willingness to speak — and the capacity to truly listen.

She is a certified profiler and trained in kinesic interviewing, which means she reads behavior, not just words. Over 25 years she has applied that skill in boardrooms, mediation sessions, whistleblower hearings, and leadership crisis situations — environments where what isn’t said matters as much as what is.

She is an accredited international mediator, a registered confidential counselor, and an Insights Discovery practitioner. Her work spans organizational integrity, behavioral analysis, executive coaching, and crisis navigation.

Kirsten grew up partly in Curaçao. She attended high school there. That experience — of being embedded in a small-island community, where professional and personal worlds overlap, where trust is built slowly and over time — is foundational to who she is as a practitioner, and to why the Caribbean Center of Excellence is not a new idea for her. It has roots.