Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter

Betterfly / IMPAQTO

Quito,
Ecuador

Michelle is the Global VP of Purpose and Communities at Betterfly, the first social unicorn start-up, with operations across Latin America. Before her current role, Michelle was the CEO and co-founder of IMPAQTO, a B Corporation with a mission to support impact entrepreneurs reach their goals by building the ecosystem and network they need to thrive. IMPAQTO offers coworking spaces, a business accelerator, innovation consulting services and an impact investing fund to Latin American entrepreneurs building a better world. Before her career in business, Michelle was the founding Country Director of Asylum Access Ecuador, a legal clinic for refugees that later scaled to Asia, Africa and did direct advocacy at the United Nations in Geneva.

As a consultant, has focused on paths to scaling impact for grassroots organizations, including an association of families of disappeared children in El Salvador, and communities at risk of development-induced displacement in Thailand, Cambodia and India. Michelle counts a number of firsts throughout her career: with IMPAQTO, she opened the first private coworking space in Ecuador, also the first certified B Corporation in the country. She launched GreenCrowds, Ecuador’s first crowdfunding platform. She is also the first woman under 40 to be named in the top 100 reputation ranking business leaders in the Merco Ranking.

Michelle is a recent mother of twins, and is married to tech and climate entrepreneur and writer Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo. They live in Quito, the place they have chosen as their home. She holds an Mst in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and a Master’s in Public Policy, UC Berkeley.