Yvonne van der Pol

Blended Learning Expert and Senior Intercultural Consultant

Yvonne van der Pol

Yvonne’s mission is to connect people across cultural, socio-economic and physical distances.

Yvonne van der Pol is a development sociologist and interculturalist. She has already been working for over 20 years on the knife edge of communication and culture. Initially with organisations in the sector of International Development and then, from 2003, as an intercultural consultant from her offices at Luz azul training, consulting & coaching. She advises on intercultural policy making, develops blended learning programmes about intercultural effectiveness, and trains and coaches professionals on developing their intercultural craftsmanship. In all of these activities, her leitmotiv has always been: to enhance a better understanding between people.

Intercultural Effectiveness

Interested in complex developmental issues, Yvonne has lived in the United States and Costa Rica, and worked with development organisations in Latin America and Africa. A sociologist by training, she was active in development cooperation for over 10 years. For the past 17 years, Yvonne has helped thousands of professionals from all over the world to develop their intercultural competences and be more effective across cultures. A board member of SIETAR Netherlands and SIETAR Europa since 2019, she became President of SIETAR Netherlands in April 2020. In 2017 Yvonne published Reflections on Intercultural Craftsmanship.

Online Learning and Facilitation

Yvonne has been a certified Online Learning and Facilitation Trainer since 2013. She is a member of IBI’s core team for the Intercultural Competence programmes for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; contributing both from an intercultural and online learning perspective to the blended and online programmes we developed. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, she created the symbaloo covid19and culture, documenting how culture affects a country’s way of dealing with the pandemic.