Charting New Waters: Embracing My New Role as a Full-Time Synergist

I’m elated to share that as of July, I’ll have the honor and privilege of joining a passionate, dynamic, and visionary team as well as getting behind a growing movement – at The Synergist!

The way I perceive the work of The Synergist – which is both an art and a science – is most beautifully encapsulated by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when he wrote:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect and cut wood, and assign them work; rather, teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.”

In both our cases, the immensity of that sea is our infatigable drive to tackle the most complex social problems, and to do so collectively, co-creatively – synergistically:

• externally, through harnessing the collective intelligence of all stakeholders;
• internally, through building the conditions that enable a genuine team spirit to dare together, learn together, fail forward together, and incubate innovations together;
• until they flourish.

Those who know me well may already see that to join The Synergist is to find a natural new home where internal minds and external missions meet. Remarkably, that’s not our only alignment.

In getting to know The Synergist, I came to realize that over the past decade, we’ve been on strikingly twin trajectories.

The Synergist started in 2013 just as I started my mandate as CEO of the European Haemophilia Consortium (EHC). In that time and without mutual awareness, we respectively led high-intensity growth, curated similar team cultures, and designed purpose-driven health strategies based on broad systemic thinking. Ten years later, we find ourselves looking toward the same horizon.

While building on the work it has done in health, The Synergist is poised to tackle additional complex challenges in the environmental and broader social sectors. Convergently, after over a decade in patient advocacy, the broader urgency of our world’s problems draws me back to my academic and early professional roots in environmental, development, and complex emergency issues.

With my heart remaining amongst the communities that I’ve previously served – first, vulnerable populations affected by armed conflict and, second, patients and families affected by rare bleeding disorders – I look forward to this next chapter through which I’ll aim to serve not just new causes, but in so doing also continue to benefit my old ones.

As a close friend and mentor likes to quote, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’

More about Amanda:

Amanda Bok is a recognized thought leader by the healthcare community. She has worked in international patient advocacy on behalf of people affected by rare bleeding disorders since 2009, first through the World Federation of Hemophilia (WFH), and then through the European Hemophilia Consortium (EHC) – including for a decade as its CEO.

Over the years, Amanda served as a patient representative on the European Commission Expert Group on Rare Diseases (2013-2016), the European Reference Network EuroBloodNet (2016-2019), the European Patients’ Forum (EPF) Ethics Committee (2020-2023), and is a first-cohort EUPATI fellow.

Amanda had her professional start in international humanitarian aid and human rights issues. Previously to patient advocacy, she worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as liaison to the United Nations both in Geneva and New York. 

She holds a Master of Science in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a Bachelor of Arts in English and International Relations from Austin College.

Her career path was deeply informed by her personal background, experiences, and exposures growing up in both the world’s richest as well as poorest countries, across three continents. She speaks English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch.