Daniela Papi-Thornton

Daniela’s interest in volunteer travel began with her work in Cambodia as the founder of PEPY Tours, an education travel company and PEPY, a youth leadership organization. During her six years in Cambodia, Daniela shifted PEPY’s work away from a focus on service to a focus on development education. She became an international advocate for a learning-first approach to service, as the anti-orphanage tourism movement. She went on to do her MBA at Oxford’s Said Business School through the Skoll Scholarship and subsequently began working for the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship. As the Deputy Director of the Center, Daniela designed new leadership programming for students interested in social impact careers and created educational curricula on systems-led approaches to social change. Her report and accompanying SSIR article on Tackling Heropreneurshp have been widely read, and the Impact Gaps Canvas, a tool she designed to help people consider the systems in which they work, is used in many universities around the world. Daniela now lives in sunny Boulder, Colorado with her husband and young son.