Daniela has spent more than a decade designing and facilitating social impact education programing around the world. Her work has ranged from running a development education travel company offering student and teacher training to designing leadership programs at the University of Oxford and serving as a Lecturer at Yale School of Management. Her work rethinking social entrepreneurship education led to the design of a range of education programs, a tool called the Impact Gaps Canvas (now used at universities around the world), a widely read report on Tackling Heropreneurship, and this TEDx talk summarizing her perspective on the need for systems-led leadership.

Daniela conducted research as part of the Clore Social Leadership Programme and uncovered a trend in social entrepreneurship education and funding: more focus was placed on innovation and social business start-up training than on helping hopeful change makers understand the system of their chosen challenge. As the Deputy Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, she designed new student programming initiatives based on this research, including the Leading for Impact program, “Apprenticing with a Problem” funding, and Map the System, a global competition which now running at ~40 universities around the world. The contest is designed around the Impact Gaps Canvas, a tool to help budding change makers better understand their chosen challenge and to learn about and then build upon the landscape of solutions already being tried.

She continues to consult for the Skoll Centre and helps manage the global Map the System competition. Through that work, she and a team of other educators realized that the Impact Gaps Canvas alone was not enough to support students in understanding and mapping systems, so she helped design a Student’s Guide to Mapping a System and a Teaching Guide companion, both available on the Resources Page.

Daniela now runs workshops and training programs to help others use these tools and helps people redesign their education and funding programs to align with systems-led leadership goals. She has taught classes on social entrepreneurship and systems-led leadership around the world and her thought leadership on social impact education has been featured in many global conferences, and in key articles read by the social sector, including Stanford Social Innovation Review’s third most read article of 2016: Tackling Heropreneurship.

Prior to her time in Oxford, Daniela spent six years in Cambodia where she founded and grew a youth leadership organization, PEPY, an educational travel company, PEPY Tours, and an advocacy organization, Learning Service. In 2018, the book Daniela co-authored on rethinking volunteer travel was released, and you can find that here.