Pierre is Paragon’s Regional Representative for Europe. Based in Brussels, he connects Paragon with European foundations, particularly those funding urban development and social innovation in Africa. He brings a quality-management perspective to how they structure cross-border grantmaking and grantee due diligence. He has over 30 years of experience working with NGOs, UN agencies, foundations, and companies across Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
He began his career in international development with the NGO Enda Tiers Monde in Senegal, supporting EU-funded community environmental programs. He then joined the United Nations Development Programme in the Dominican Republic, where he managed projects under the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme, which channels funding directly to local NGOs and community organizations.
In 2001, he became Director of the national partner network at CSR Europe, a Brussels-based business network promoting corporate responsibility. He coordinated 22 national business organizations that together represented some 1,800 companies. He then led training and leadership development at the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), whose Excellence Model is Europe’s counterpart to the U.S. Baldrige framework for assessing organizational performance.
In 2009, Pierre set out as a freelancer, advising nonprofits, social enterprises, and public bodies on designing, monitoring, and evaluating European and regional projects. He has assessed organizations against the EFQM model, reviewed grant applications as an independent expert evaluator for Horizon 2020, the European Union’s flagship research and innovation funding program, and served as a quality expert for Belgian higher education.
Since 2017, while continuing his advisory work, Pierre has focused mainly on teaching in a master’s program and managing research projects in Design for Social Innovation, programs he co-founded at ST-LUC BXL Arts College in Brussels. He also coordinates a specialized master’s program, co-organized with UCLouvain, that trains architects, urbanists, and designers, many from French-speaking Africa, to address urban challenges through design for social innovation.
Pierre speaks fluent French, English, and Spanish. He holds a master’s degree in management from ESSEC (France) and a BSc in Rural Sociology from Cornell University (USA).