Claire Fallender is a Leadership Group Member at Ashoka and currently serves as Interim Director for Latin America while leading Ashoka's global youth strategy to help ensure that all young people can thrive in a rapidly changing world as changemakers. Throughout her career, Claire has been driven by a deep commitment to justice, fairness, and the belief that everyone has the potential to create positive change. Her trajectory was strongly shaped by her parents: a mathematician mother who challenged gender norms and later became a community leader in public education, and a business executive father whose international work exposed Claire to diverse cultures and perspectives. Together, they instilled in her a profound sense of fairness and confidence that she could make a difference. 

Claire's changemaking journey began in high school, where she led her school's social change organization and coordinated student initiatives focused on housing, health, and social justice. Early volunteer experiences in Honduras taught her the importance of community-led solutions and the unintended consequences that can arise when outsiders drive change without local ownership. At Yale College, Claire continued to advance social justice causes, launching the Students Against Sweatshops campaign after witnessing labor violations while interning with a garment workers' union in New York. The campaign successfully persuaded Yale to adopt a Code of Conduct governing the ethical sourcing of licensed products. During a study-abroad experience in Chile, she encountered an Ashoka Fellow whose approach to systems change deeply shaped her understanding of how people closest to a problem are often best positioned to solve it. Inspired by this experience, Claire joined Ashoka after graduation. 

Over the course of her career at Ashoka, Claire has worked across nearly every level of the Venture and Fellowship program, Ashoka’s flagship initiative to find, support and connect social entrepreneurs addressing the world’s most urgent problems. After starting in Washington, DC, she moved to Brazil, where she led the Fellowship program and co-designed Ashoka Brazil's first youth changemaking initiative with a Brazilian Ashoka Fellow. Seeking to deepen her understanding of the intersection between social innovation and public policy, she left Ashoka in 2004 to earn a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. During this period, she worked with UNICEF to develop the first inter-agency guidelines across seven United Nations agencies for supporting adolescent girls. 

Following Princeton, Claire joined Oikos-Cooperation and Development in Mozambique as  Country Director, helping farmer and fishing cooperatives develop innovative responses to climate change and the HIV epidemic. Recognizing the limited support available to local social entrepreneurs, she returned to Ashoka to lead the Global Venture and Fellowship Program, overseeing the search, selection, and engagement of the world's largest network of leading social entrepreneurs. 

In the past decade, Claire has worked across Ashoka's global network to develop strategy, systems, partnerships, and measurement tools that strengthen youth changemaking worldwide. Beyond her professional responsibilities, Claire is passionate about the care economy and volunteers to support policy efforts that support caregivers in Washington, DC. Claire enjoys hiking and crafting and is grateful for the support of her husband and two young sons.