Author & Founder

Alinda Nortje is the founder and Executive Chairperson of Free To Grow (Pty) Ltd. She is also the developer of all Free To Grow’s programmes.

Since an early age Alinda had a passion for making a positive difference in people’s lives. Studying social work (BA Hons at the University of Stellenbosch) was for her a logical starting point of professionalising this passion.

“It was while doing community development on farms in the Boland that I became aware of the dire need for a personal empowerment programme accessible to people with an educational backlog,” says Alinda.

“There was nothing available in South Africa that had the desired impact and the international programmes were not relevant enough to our context, so I began to design a course myself. Over a four year period, I incorporated the input of hundreds of participants into the course design, so the end result really related to people’s lives.”

The feedback was excellent and inspired the vision to make this process available to as many people as possible. Free To Grow was established in 1994 as a vehicle for this purpose. Alinda has ample experience of developing programmes for growth and change on an individual and organisational level and is recognised as an expert in this field.  She brings to her work 25 years of experience in a wide range of industries and contexts, as well as the learnings from attending best practises workshops in Amsterdam, Vancouver, Dallas, London and Stockholm. This enables her to blend cutting edge international learning and dialogue methodologies e.g. open space technology, word café, graphic facilitation and future search with homegrown approaches, resulting in the fresh, rich and stimulating learning methodology that has become the trademark of Free To Grow’s training.

Alinda is a speaker on different aspects of personal mastery and regularly presents at national and international forums where her sessions always receive excellent ratings.

Alinda has been recognised for her entrepreneurial spirit by being selected as a finalist in the Top Awards: Top Woman Entrepreneur of 2010. She was also the runner up of the Western Cape Entrepreneur of the year award in 1996.

In 1999 Alinda received the prestigious national IPM People Driven Growth award for the ‘achievement of excellence in sustained commitment to investment in human potential.’