Therapeutic depth, entrepreneurial reach, accelerator data, clinical credibility, governance experience, local architectural lead.
This is not a property developer with civic dressing. Each member is doing what they have spent decades becoming good at. The project is the meeting point.
Co-founders
Oliver Brook
Oliver is a Guernsey-based architect and community planner with established working relationships across the Planning Service and a deep working knowledge of how the island's planning system operates in practice. Most architectural appointments come at the end of a brief; this project is structured the other way around. Oliver was named in early — at the brief stage — to keep the project's architectural ambition tethered to what can be built on this site under this planning regime.
He is also, in the most useful sense of the word, a dreamer. The Island Exchange exists in part because Oliver was willing to imagine an inhabited Victorian sea wall, a corner atrium that opens to two streets, a roof that is publicly time-zoned. That combination — local knowledge of consent, with the imagination to push beyond convention — is what this project requires from its lead local architect.
Sonia La Casavera
Sonia is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist with over 2,000 practice hours, based in St Peter Port. She practises from La Casa Vera (her private practice) and from The Sanctuary, working with individuals, couples, families, teenagers and adults. She is a graduate of the Digital Greenhouse Startup Academy in Guernsey, where she built and scaled a wellbeing business alongside her clinical practice — giving her lived experience as both therapist and entrepreneur.
Her clinical training spans Clinical Systemic Family Psychotherapy at Masters level, Humanistic Integrative and Person-Centred practice, Clean Language and Metaphor, Gestalt and Transactional Analysis, attachment-based and compassion-focused approaches.
In this project, Sonia is co-author of the brief, lead on the therapeutic and atmospheric framework that runs through every space, and the bridge between the design team and the operator. She is the founder behind the wider New Beginnings ecosystem of which the Island Exchange is the physical hub.
Marc Winn
Marc is a Guernsey-based entrepreneur, writer and speaker who works at the intersection of business, community and purpose. He is the creator of the Ikigai Venn Diagram — a 2014 blog post that has been widely shared internationally and is now used in workplaces, classrooms and books on purpose and meaning. The original post came from Guernsey.
Marc is the author of The 50 Coffee Adventure, a TEDx speaker, and co-founder of the Dandelion Project — whose mission was to make Guernsey the best place to live on earth, using the island as a testbed for solving the world's toughest challenges.
In this project, Marc leads on strategy, narrative, partnerships, and the running of the wider ecosystem — Good Vibrations, the Hive platform, corporate retainer relationships and international links.
Co-authors
Doug Scott
Doug is the founder of Red Brain and co-author of this document. He has backed both Ignite and Entrepreneur First — two of the UK's most respected accelerators — and across 20+ cohorts and 200+ companies he carries real return data and hard-won operational knowledge.
Good Vibrations (the regulated-finance accelerator within the Island Exchange ecosystem) is built in part on his experience and his ongoing input.
Cheryl Meerveld
Cheryl is co-author and brings hands-on experience of the kind of project the Island Exchange is. She is a trained Clean Language coach — sharing the same therapeutic foundation that runs through the building's atmosphere — and a trained cuddle therapist (safe, consensual, non-sexual touch as nervous-system regulation). She has founded and run five companies, and facilitated an international symposium in the Netherlands on creating community hubs and spaces.
Most of the team can describe what a community hub should feel like; Cheryl has actually run the rooms, designed the programme, held the operational realities of bringing different groups into the same space.
Clinical and governance backers
Jeff Faris
One of the most experienced systemic psychotherapists and clinical psychologists in the United Kingdom, with over 40 years in practice as a Consultant Psychotherapist. HCPC registered, UK Registered Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor accredited with the UK Association for Family Therapy. Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy at The Family Institute (1988–2019).
Jeff is Sonia's clinical supervisor and is backing this project. His endorsement of the therapeutic framework carries significant clinical weight.
Dr Jo Le Noury
Retired GP and former Public Health Associate Specialist in Guernsey, and one of the island's most respected medical voices. She is supporting the project as governance adviser. After her own ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2015, she became a prominent national advocate for early diagnosis and women's health; in March 2026 she spoke at the UK House of Commons during Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.
She chairs Bright Tights, the Guernsey charity for gynaecological cancers. Her involvement is directly aligned with the project's MAP Health partnership and the holistic health offer.
La Cache House — retreat partner
Avia Willment
Avia runs La Cache House at St Pierre du Bois and leads the Creative Health Network — an infrastructure for healers, teachers and practitioners. She holds the practitioner community that connects through the wider ecosystem and the deeper, immersive retreat work that takes place in nature.
La Cache House is the countryside retreat counterpart to the coastal hub, turning inward to the land where the Island Exchange turns outward to the sea.
Why the team matters here
Oliver leads the local architectural work and the planning relationships that make the project deliverable. Sonia's therapeutic depth shapes every interior decision. Marc's entrepreneurial reach drives the ecosystem and partnerships. Doug brings hard accelerator data. Cheryl brings direct operational experience of community hubs and the programme-design discipline. Jeff and Jo provide clinical and governance credibility. Avia and La Cache House extend the work into the countryside.
Each is doing what they have spent decades becoming good at. The project is the meeting point.