CEO and Founder

Eric Wolterstorff
PhD

Dr. Wolterstorff’s expertise is cultural psychosocial development and group trauma, in particular the behavior of societies responding to existential, long-term threats. He founded and leads Sovereignty First.

Since 2012, Dr. Wolterstorff has worked with the US stability operations and nation-building community, including the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the US Army War College, the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy and other peacebuilding NGOs, active and retired ambassadors, generals and colonels, politicians, and investors to develop tools to improve self-governance, the quality and likelihood of success of stability operations, and investments in politically and culturally opaque countries with weak rule of law and contract enforcement.

As the head of a crisis management firm, he led five successful turnarounds in the United States and Indonesia, and is part-owner and serves a senior advisor Cooperative Capacity Partners.

As a psychotherapist, he trained hundreds of trauma psychotherapists in the United States and Germany and serves as a member of the advisory board of The Healing Trauma Collective.

As part of his decades-long contribution to the democratization of psychotherapy, Dr. Wolterstorff offers a series of short, inexpensive guidebooks for individuals to use to guide and assist their personal growth.

Dr. Wolterstorff’s goal is to help social impact investor ecosystem builders trying to solve complex problems in frontier markets.