Adding value to the world through inspiring others, Sophie Peccaud’s expanding scope of work with Inspire Citizens is playing a vital part in facilitating positive change in the world of international schools.

Some people find their calling in a classroom. Sophie Peccaud found hers somewhere between a Caribbean harbour, a living room in Rio de Janeiro, and a beach in the Philippines — carried there by a sense that the world had more to offer than any curriculum she had been handed.

Today, as a member of the Inspire Citizens team, Sophie works at the intersection of student leadership, conference design, and community engagement. She thrives on building partnerships and advocating for the global proliferation of ideas that make education a platform from which to launch positive change. As an integral member of Inspire Citizens, she helps amplify ideas through social media, written articles podcasts and direct support of community practitioners. Sophie is the person in the room who, without trying, makes the room feel warmer. She describes herself as "a big dose of positivity and sunshine" — and those who have worked alongside her tend to agree. But beneath the warmth is a story shaped by difficulty, by a stubborn belief that education could be something other than what she experienced, and by a series of encounters with people living in profound alignment with their values. That story is worth telling.

A System That Did Not See Her

Sophie grew up in an industrialized region in the north of France in what seems like a completely different world from her current coastal home in the southwest. In her youth, she was at risk of becoming a product of a system that seemed at odds with values so central to her life now. From her base in a small village near Biarritz, Sophie is able to realize her deep desire to connect with nature while still drawing inspiration from her lived experiences, starting in early adolescence.

"I had a really hard time in middle school and high school," she reflects. “In the French system, there is not a lot of space for self-awareness or self-expression. It's really about compartmentalized academics. We were taught to think about math and just math, then think about literature and just literature. I was really uninspired. I didn't really care about anything."

What Sophie craved, and rarely found, was permission to be a whole person. She was deeply disconcerted to realize that what she learned in school seemed drastically disconnected with what she was experiencing in the real world. When she finally reached university level study, she found resonance with ESTICE, a business school that offered some freedom of choice, she chose travel. A placement in the British Virgin Islands, driving boats, opened her eyes to the sheer variety of human experience. "I existed in my bubble of feeling like I can't do anything," she recalls, “and then I discovered that there are thousands of different ways to see life.

A Living Room, a Forest, and a Different Kind of Business

The turning point came in Brazil, during her second year of study. She had joined a Facebook group for French students in Rio de Janeiro and connected with a woman named Anna, who was working to bring city dwellers into relationship with indigenous communities in the Amazon. Sophie went to meet her. They ended up sharing an apartment and, in their living room, they built a startup based on social enterprise principles.

Braziliando, as they called it, was a community engagement venture that took urban Brazilians into Amazonian communities not as tourists, but as learners. "They became part of daily life in the Amazon and really discovered what it means to be part of that tribe," Sophie explains. "It was not about going there and enjoying a trip. It was about learning from the indigenous culture."

Sophie reflects that her worldview was substantially impacted by her collaboration with locally-based partners. “They deeply changed my perspective on life,” she recalls. “I realized that if we listen to them we learn about most solutions we need for our planet to thrive.”

What struck Sophie most deeply was not the work itself, but Anna: a woman with a daughter to raise, running a purpose-driven enterprise as her livelihood. “It was incredible to learn that you can create a business that actually allows you to live from it, but also create impact — and have a lot of fun through it because it is really based on your passion." The concept of social entrepreneurship took root.

The Philippines, the Pandemic, and a Pivot to Schools

Moving from theory to practice, Sophie gained insight from intercultural experiences that provided a solid base for her work with Inspire Citizens partners seeking to develop more authentic educational pathways for their students.

Her final undergraduate semester took her to the Philippines, where she connected with Make a Difference (MAD) Travel — a company running experiential learning journeys with indigenous Aeta communities in the north of the country. She joined as an intern, then as sales director, and eventually became part of the founding team of MAD Courses, which she helped build over seven years.

When COVID-19 shuttered the travel industry, the team reimagined what community connection could look like through a screen. Online experiential learning pathways brought schools into the picture. And that’s when Sophie discovered international education. It was, she says, a world she had not anticipated finding so meaningful.

She also, somewhat incidentally, found her way back to her university in France. Sophie felt welcomed to share her experiences and, importantly, help to shape the future of the business program. Director Antoine Blondelle invited Sophie to teach principles of social entrepreneurship and, to this day, she continues to challenge emerging entrepreneurs and professionals to consider combining their passion with social impact. This fact reveals something essential about how Sophie moves through the world: she does not wait for heaven-sent solutions; she engages and challenges others to embody the outcomes they most desire.

Joining Inspire Citizens: A Convergence More Than a Coincidence

Sophie first encountered the Inspire Citizens team at a Changemakers Conference in Frankfurt, where she heard Experiential Learning Facilitator Ivy Yan speak about deep ecology. The following year, she met IC Co-Founder Aaron Moniz at a CEESA conference in Lithuania. He was describing something she had not heard articulated quite that way before: a whole-school approach to transforming culture, working with students, teachers, and administrators together, building systemic change over time.

"I was thinking, ‘wow — I really think this is something I want to be part of,’” she says. When MAD Courses shifted its focus in a direction that no longer felt like her own, the transition to Inspire Citizens was, as she describes it, natural.

On the stage and behind the scenes, Sophie works with school partners to facilitate student leadership approaches that are framed by proven methodologies such as Empathy to Impact.

She joined in a business development capacity but has steadily moved toward what she loves most: being close to students. Since early 2025, she has expanded her focus to include student leadership, hosting and facilitating conferences across Europe and beyond. The Changemakers Conference series, which she has watched grow from roughly 100 students in Frankfurt to more than 300 in Dusseldorf, has become something of a throughline in her story.

The Morocco Conference: Sparking Something New

Perhaps no chapter better illustrates Sophie's approach to this work than the Morocco Student Leadership Conference, which she co-facilitated with Inspire Citizens colleague Aimee Meditz. It was, by most accounts, the first conference of its kind for international schools in the region and Sophie brought to it something that no curriculum could supply: two years of living in Morocco, fluency in local context, and relationships with speakers who understood the ground beneath their feet.

"The students came back to us and said: ‘it's the first time we had the opportunity create a project, implement it, and reflect on it’" she recalls. “Participants insisted that, for them, it was the first time they had a space to talk about issues that make them anxious, or hopeful, or joyful."

For Sophie, the conference confirmed something she had long believed: that students know what they care about. What they often lack is the how — a framework for moving from passion to action, from a strong feeling to a meaningful workshop or project. That is precisely where she meets them. "I really want them to have a clear why and also know what they can do about it. That gives students the leadership power to actually inspire others."

The Changemakers Conference series has since expanded its reach, and Sophie is preparing to host new conferences from Paris to Korea. She is currently working online with students to implement their projects in Lithuania and the Netherlands. Wherever she goes, she brings the same conviction: the conference is not the destination. It is the spark.

"You don't change culture in two days," she says. "But in two days, you can create sparks. You can spark conversations. You can spark mindsets. You can spark reflections. And then you recognize that spark is not a one-time event. It is a leadership journey that is just beginning." By way of example, Sophie points to her work with IC’s Aaron Moniz and Scott Jamieson to deliberately design a program around core skills including project management, feedback for growth, finding one’s ‘why’ and more – all bound up in a very effective package of Micro Credentials. [more information in this related feature].

Rooted in Place, Reaching Outward

Sophie's work has always moved between the local and the global. She teaches her students that global mindsets must be grounded in local action. And she lives this herself.

A decade in to her journey, and back in France – this time in the nature-rich south, where the mountains meet the ocean – Sophie continues expanding her portfolio of impact. She has partnered with Marion, the founder of Efflorescence, an alternative school for Early Years and Primary learners. Together, they are building out a middle school, grade by grade, that will eventually serve students through to grade nine by 2028. Sophie is already planning courses in international leadership that will facilitate connections between students in France and vital parts of a worldwide network of changemakers.

It is not a coincidence that Sophie has returned to middle school, the age at which she herself felt most lost. "I feel like if there is one point where you think most about your identity," she says. “It is in middle school. And I want to give back to the world what I did not have at that age."

Surfing is a sport that provides joy and connection to nature for Sophie. It also serves as a metaphor for navigating the interactive space between people and places.

She has also found, in surfing, something she was not seeking but clearly needed: a practice that keeps her present, a community that exists wherever she travels, and a metaphor she returns to often in her work. The ocean, she has come to understand, is not separate from the educator she is becoming. It is part of what makes her one. It offers a space for Sophie to move both with and by the very natural forces that sustains us all.

The Word That Guides Her

Each year, Sophie chooses a word to carry with her. In 2024, it was gratitude.

"I have a lot of energy, and sometimes I forget to pause and feel gratitude for where I am," she admits. "I am in a generation where many of my friends are doing work they don't love because it pays well, or work they love that doesn't pay at all. I feel like I am somewhere in between,” she muses. “I can live in France, and I can also have the impact I want to have in the world, and I love the process."

She speaks with warmth about the Inspire Citizens team, including Aaron, Scott, Ivy, Lottie, and Aimee, and the generosity with which they have shared their experience, their resources, and their confidence in her. "Every time I ask for help to design a session or brainstorm a concept, they are always there. The first months I was at Inspire Citizens, I took the Global Citizenship Certificate program. Now, after two years, I feel so empowered."

And then she offers a line that might serve as a kind of credo for the work Inspire Citizens does, and for the educator Sophie is becoming:

"You hear so much about the what and the why. But sometimes you just need someone to take your hand and help you implement… and to be with you throughout the process."

Adventures in Changemaking: Sophie Peccaud and the Work of Inspiring Others to Act