Chantal Braunwalder

Chantal Braunwalder's lifelong pursuit has been to trailblaze a new paradigm of human flourishing — one that empowers individuals with agency and equal opportunity to contribute to enabling ecosystems across the globe to create a more resilient, innovative and inclusive tomorrow that is guided by compassionate, effective leaders.

This calling was a result of Chantal's global travels at a young age, which led her to witness the staggering injustices plaguing today's world. It was further ignited when she discovered social entrepreneurship during her undergraduate studies in business administration at the University of St. Gallen, where she launched her first project with refugees in Switzerland. This passion led her to dive deep into sustainability and social justice, in academia and her work at ETH Zurich at the Sustainability in Business Lab.

Combined with her drive toward innovation and her fascination for moonshot ideas — i.e., making the impossible possible — Chantal decided she wanted to expand her horizon and her capability to become an impactful leader driving world-changing ventures. This led her to do an exchange at Harvard University, where her conviction crystallized as she founded and spearheaded her own social venture, Team Spirit International, which was dedicated to catalyzing self-reliance among refugees in Uganda. Chantal combined vision and execution by designing curricula, marshaling stakeholders, fundraising, coordinating and facilitating a vocational training in a refugee settlement. This profound immersion and her fellowship at impl. project, a non-governmental organization revolutionizing microdata for effective programming, illustrated the need to innovate beyond dependency models and toward solutions which enable long-term self-sufficiency while integrating more on-the-ground perspectives and enabling true collaboration with local implementors.

Chantal’s dedication to impactful work also got her involved with the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which encourages a philosophical and pragmatic rigor in "doing good better" through evidence-based and cost-effective means. The movement also connected her with like-minded leaders across the world.

Chantal's coaching certification underscores her belief that ethical, effective leadership demands deep self-awareness and value alignment. Her own journey in unlocking one’s potential and coaching others in doing so reinforces this pursuit of inner transformation as the bedrock for sustainable societal transformation. With exposure to 35+ countries through travel and work in sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and innovation, Chantal has cultivated a nuanced, intersectional perspective on social impact.

In her free time, Chantal loves exploring outdoors, doing yoga, running, having philosophical discussions, relaxing with a nice book and a coffee, going thrifting, journaling, taking part in or organizing personal development workshops, visiting cultural exhibitions.

Chantal is thrilled to be part of the Global Human Development Program and hopes to contribute bold ideas and encourage ethical innovation and the conviction to reshape the trajectory of our future with a new age of leadership.

Summer internship

During my summer internship with the Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar Initiative at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), I engaged in decolonial development efforts that support Burmese scholars in the diaspora to advance research for a democratic and gender-sensitive future. Working with more than 10 partners in fields such as climate resilience, digital security, governance, Women, Peace and Security (WPS), and public policy, I managed stakeholders, supported evaluation efforts, conducted interviews and focus groups, created impact stories, and initiated ecosystem-building efforts for grantees and scholars.

It was an incredibly enriching experience that allowed me to apply concepts from my classes on qualitative research, gender and security, and decolonizing development in practice. I also saw how dialogue, long-term support, and community-led research create space for agency, resilience, and future building even amid conflict. Highlights included joining an intensive seven-week training on sustainable development, visiting an Indigenous village to learn about community resilience, being trained in dialogue and observing a WPS dialogue among civil society leaders, and learning from researchers who were human rights defenders and active in preserving traditional knowledge in the face of the climate crisis.