Andy NILSEN

Andy Nilsen is the Creator and Global Director of SHIFT, a youth leadership and changemaker accelerator built around a deceptively simple question: how can large institutions play a more effective role in supporting independent youth-led groups to address the issues facing their communities? Hosted but not bounded by Save the Children, SHIFT is a small disruptor inside the sector, working in more than 25 countries to flip the traditional development dynamic. Its conviction is simple: young people learn to lead by being trusted to lead. SHIFT's four-stage pipeline—CONNECT, PLAN, CREATE, ACTIVATE—pairs young people with the design tools, creative collaborators, and seed funding to bring their ideas to life, while training local organisations to deliver the model themselves.

Born from work with marginalised communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, SHIFT is now expanding into Europe, with programmes in the UK, Netherlands, and Italy. Wherever it works, SHIFT speaks to a shared question: how to engage and empower new generations to lead on the challenges their communities and the world now face.

With over 18 years in international development, he founded SHIFT while serving as Save the Children's Director of Communications in Myanmar, where he saw the potential of young people to shape their communities, and the absence of pathways for them to become genuine partners to development organisations. He is now reimagining how youth development is funded and delivered. Under his leadership, SHIFT is experimenting with direct blockchain grant distribution to youth-led groups, and developing SHIFT Brain—an AI platform that brings the collective knowledge of thousands of SHIFT practitioners worldwide to anyone supporting young changemakers.

Earlier, he served as an Australian Government Adviser and Global Head of Communications for The Fred Hollows Foundation. He leads his global team from Melbourne.