Ruqaya Kalla and Fabian Graf at AUREA: Making the Better Choice Affordable

Ruqaya Kalla was describing the energy drink she is developing, something naturally based instead of the junk on the shelf, when she turned the argument on herself. "How can we maybe lessen our profit but yet be able to make it available to more people?" A few minutes later she put the harder version of it to the room: "It's weird because you're trying to go sustainable but everything sustainable is more expensive. So how do you expect them to choose that if they can't even afford that?"

She had just come off the heart-based new paradigm panel at AUREA II's Golden Future event in Miami, alongside Fabian Graf. She is a South African entrepreneur, a mother of five, and a coach trained across multiple healing modalities who works in import and export, agriculture, and a nonprofit called Football for Peace. He is a Belgian who has lived in Miami for 24 years, spent 18 of them in commercial real estate investment, and for the last two and a half has been building reforestation biotechnology. Soul Ballard, a self-described conscious documentarian who hosts and co-produces an interview series, sat them down together afterward.

What heart-based leadership means, according to Ruqaya Kalla and Fabian Graf

Both defined it as work that sets the ego down and reaches past the person doing it. Kalla put it as interconnection with consequences: "You're not focused on doing things for yourself only, you're trying to do things so that it's for the better of everyone."

Graf agreed and added a mechanic to it. For him the heart-based part starts as clarity, understanding how the heart speaks to you, and then becomes obedience to that signal. "The ability to follow through, to listen to the voice, take action, no matter what." He was candid that the path is rarely legible while you are on it. "I can see the final destination, but how do we get there is very obscure." What he offered against that fog was faith, courage, and one step at a time.

He also named the return on it, in the terms an investor would understand. When he was operating for himself, the ceiling was low. "When I go beyond myself, there's so much more that gets created."

What Fabian Graf's reforestation company actually does

It restores heavily degraded land at scale using microorganisms, then regrows complete forest with biodiversity on top of it. The mix he described spans agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, plantation forest and forest preservation, deployed as one platform rather than as separate projects.

The numbers he gave are the interesting part. A 3,000 hectare project is running now in Peru, and the platform is being scaled toward developing 10,000 to 50,000 hectares at once. He came to this two and a half years ago, after nearly two decades in commercial real estate investment, and he was unsentimental about why he switched. Regenerating nature was the way he found to express his purpose and leave something behind. "I'm very serious about it and I enjoy it very much."

Why Ruqaya Kalla is deliberately taking less profit on her next product

The good version of a product is almost always the expensive one, and she considers that a design failure rather than a fact of life. She is building a naturally based energy drink and intends to price it against that problem, accepting a thinner margin so more people can reach it.

She was equally frank about where she cannot do this yet. Her logistics business, she said, is clearing and logistics services, which means working with whatever shipping capacity exists. "It's not like I own a shipping company or something that would be awesome, because then you have the ability to create change on a deeper level." The import and export side is where she has room to move, so that is where she is moving. Her broader read on the food supply is that substitution has been running the wrong direction for years, with cheaper ingredients replacing nutritional ones because the cheaper ones carry more profit. She used sugar and aspartame as her example of a swap sold as an improvement, which is her assessment rather than a settled scientific finding.

Should conscious businesses put people before profit?

Kalla declined the clean version of that question and argued for a balance instead. "It's unrealistic to say completely putting people before profits, because in the end everyone wants to make money, wants to grow, and we have to also keep in mind that when you make money you can also give back."

Her logic runs in a loop rather than a line. The more money you have, the more you can give back, if giving back is something you actually intend to do. She was clear that not everyone does. The third leg she added, and the one most often left out of conscious-business conversations, was employment. "It's great that we have AI and all these things coming up and all new technologies, but humans still need jobs, and so we need to be very aware of creating jobs."

Graf's version of a golden future was regenerative and circular. His view is that the technologies to use what the Earth has sustainably already exist and the missing step is implementation, alongside the harder task of aligning people from different cultures and backgrounds on something that serves everyone. "We can create ways to add value without extracting."

Why both of them name education as the bottleneck

Asked what an ordinary viewer could actually do, both went to education first, and both meant something broader than school. Graf's argument is generational. "If we can early on start teaching the kids who are becoming adults and becoming the leader of the future how it actually can be done," then the new thinking arrives as a native language rather than a conversion. He counted his own generation as mostly past that point, waking up now but doing it the hard way.

The problem has two halves and they compound: lack of information and active misinformation. In her reading, schools, governments and media are all narrowing what people see, which means the work is double: fill the gap and correct the record at the same time. Both of them treated events like AUREA as part of that machinery, not a substitute for it.

She then folded the point inward, which is where the conversation got its sharpest line. "It's almost hard to want a better future for the collective when you don't really see one for yourself."

Why the sustainable choice stays out of reach for most people

Cost and access, in that order. The greener option is routinely the pricier one, and people default to what they can afford, which in food means the cheapest and least healthy things on the shelf. Telling those people to choose better without changing the price is asking for a decision they do not have.

Availability is the second wall. In her country, she said, organic is not easily found, and sustainable options generally require going out of your way. Add busy lives to limited stock and even people who are aware end up settling. She applied the same lens to the healing world, where people say an event or a modality or a coach is out of reach, and there she pushed back on herself again. Some of it is genuine constraint. Some of it is priority: people will pay a doctor for every scan and balk at paying for anything else. Her conclusion was that the field has to make the case sharper, because the pressure is only building. "If we don't become more aware and change our ways toward the Earth, there's not going to be anything left to change."

What the AUREA II panel gave the two of them

Both said the value was diversity of background held together by one direction. Graf opened the panel on exactly that premise, that people can align beyond their own interest, and watching it happen live was what stayed with him. "Being completely diverse and being aligned in one direction."

Kalla's experience started before the stage. The panelists gravitated toward each other, sat together, talked before going up, and found more synchronicity between them than they expected. She thought the audience could feel it. Graf's take on why rooms like this are worth the time was less about agreement than about friction. "Perspective really gives us the ability to question ourselves, look at what we do, and get new ideas." He included the act of speaking in that. Saying his own thing in a new way, under different circumstances, put him back in check.

Kalla closed on the same note, aimed at anyone watching who assumes they are past this. "No matter where you are in your journey, you can always learn. You can learn from others. There's no end to growing and there's no end to learning." Events like this one, she said, are a gift if you decide to treat them as one.

Watch the full talk above.

Frequently asked questions

Who are Ruqaya Kalla and Fabian Graf?

Ruqaya Kalla is a South African entrepreneur, mother of five, and coach trained across multiple healing modalities, with businesses in import and export and agriculture plus a nonprofit called Football for Peace. Fabian Graf is Belgian, has lived in Miami for 24 years, spent 18 years in commercial real estate investment, and now builds reforestation biotechnology. Both spoke on the heart-based new paradigm panel at AUREA II in Miami.

What does heart-based leadership mean?

In their definitions, it means setting ego aside and acting for outcomes larger than your own. Kalla framed it as recognizing interconnection and then working for the good of everyone rather than yourself alone. Graf framed it as getting clear on how your heart speaks to you and then following that signal into action, even when the route is obscure and only the destination is visible.

What reforestation work does Fabian Graf do?

His company restores heavily degraded land at scale using microorganisms, then regrows full forest with biodiversity across agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, plantation forest and forest preservation. He described a 3,000 hectare project underway in Peru and a platform being scaled toward developing 10,000 to 50,000 hectares at a time. He moved into this work about two and a half years ago from commercial real estate investment.

Why does Ruqaya Kalla say sustainable products are unaffordable?

Because the better version almost always costs more, and people buy what they can afford. She pointed to organic food being both pricier and harder to find, especially in her country, and to busy lives that make going out of your way impractical. Her own response is to build a naturally based energy drink priced on a thinner margin, so the healthier option reaches more people rather than fewer.

What did they say people can do to help?

Educate, and start with themselves. Graf argued for teaching children now so the next generation of leaders grows up inside the new thinking rather than converting to it later. Kalla added that the obstacle has two parts, missing information and active misinformation, so the work is double. She also said the collective vision is hard to want until you can see a future for yourself.