Graduate Profile: Paloma Lacheta

At age 15 Paloma Lacheta was already developing social project with the Brazilian government and doing volunteer work. Not your typical teenager. A few years after that Lecheta expanded her work to collaborate with the Football for Kids Foundation, bringing donated soccer kits to children in Brazil. By 2013 she launched ImpacTour - to create and promote sustainable tourism technologies. Her early start in social conscientiousness and entrepreneurship motivated Lecheta to co-founder of PeaceLabs in 2014. This endeavor would embody the collective efforts of herself and her community. The company's mission statement is summed up well by their hashtag and twitter handle: #CheerForPeace & @CheerForPeace

But PeaceLabs is doing more than just cheering peace on, they are pushing it and building it. PeaceLabs operates as a web platform that connects social entrepreneurs, volunteers, and impact investors to create social projects collaborating with corporations any place in the world to improve their corporate social investments. This is accomplished by monitoring corporate social project portfolio with innovative new software and optimizing for social investment and impacts local to the corporation.

By digitizing social projects, we are able to learn what the best project have in common, help projects step by step, reducing subjectivity of investment decisions, and get the best returns on social investments.

Within the first year of founding PeaceLabs, Lecheta was accepted to the Founder Institute accelerator program and after her successful graduation has clients such as Fanshawe College, Copel Telecom and Robert Bosch Institute. It is estimated that in the coming years 3 billion new voices will be connecting online. Adults and children that never had access to online information will have the opportunity to use tools, such as PeaceLabs, to articulate and cocreate solutions to their own problems. Lecheta says, “We are proud to create tools with love to empower these new voices to join talented people and financial resources creating solution to the social problems of our world.

Lecheta, a self-proclaimed cheerleader for peace closed out with this advice:

The world's biggest problems are also the world's biggest business opportunities, so look around and identify a specific problem that negatively impacts your life, and the life of other people around you and start experiment solutions as soon as possible. Focus on execution is everything!