The Super-Connector

“I still get goosebumps when I think of him,” says Colleen Thouez as she is asked about her most recent foundation: For the past four years, Europe Prykhystok – in English, “shelter” – has offered respite stays for children from Ukraine’s war zones. Last year, as a group of them was on their way to stay with host families in France, a 13-year-old boy had to stay behind on Ukraine’s border with Poland. A border guard would not accept his paperwork, and the bus went on without him. Colleen Thouez was immediately called by the team that accompanied the children; one of her colleagues stayed with the boy, and the office swiftly got in touch with the administration of his hometown. The officials, in turn, got hold of his mother so she could sign the required release form.  

Yet, as with so many of the children looked after by Europe Prykhystok, the boy’s mother was fighting on the front line. “And, visualize this one, the mom leaves the front line for a signature. They get back to the city administration. Then they get back to the Polish border where they're staying in the hotel. And then they drive him to meet up with the other kids.” 

One boy, one story, and already a whole cast of actors: a mother on the front line, a city government, local administrators, ground workers, office support, and international funders behind it all. Drawing those levels together is what Colleen Thouez does best: For decades she has moved between high-level strategy and work on the ground, from the upper reaches of the UN and global philanthropy down to city halls and the work of a children's charity. 

What she is after has never changed: real change, the kind that reaches a 13-year-old stranded at a border. A friend once gave her a nickname for how she works, and it stuck: “super-connector.” She connects the right people and then mobilizes the network to achieve the impact she wants. 

She grew up in Montreal, Canada, a first-generation child of immigrants. Her father, a Frenchman from Poitiers, caught tuberculosis during the war and lost his hearing. He never spoke of it. Her mother, an American of Irish descent, graduated from law school as one of only two women in a class of five hundred, went on to a doctorate in France, and later taught at McGill Law School.  

“All of my friends’ parents were like my parents,” she says. “All of them had arrived in Canada, building a new life for their children.” The city sorted people into groups. “There were the Anglophones, the Francophones, and the Allophones. Where did you fall?” 

It was a “very accepting environment” nonetheless, she says. It also sparked a question that has remained constant throughout her life and her career: “How do you create that community of acceptance so that people really can succeed?” Colleen Thouez would carry that question far beyond the country in which it originated: “Very early I knew I was going to look at all of that from the outside. I knew probably at 12 that I was going to leave home.” 

She left and spent seventeen years at the United Nations, first in Geneva and then in the US. She ran its Institute for Training and Research in her early thirties, one of the youngest to hold the post. She was rising fast in a world run largely by men, and the friction showed in small yet telling ways. 

Motherhood especially was something women were expected to keep out of sight. Colleen Thouez had her first baby at the age of 33, when she was running a UN division. Among her team were “these highly accomplished ambassadors, people who had worked in the highest levels of the UN.” She was the director, and she also needed to pump milk, so she kept a breast pump at work. “And one day, one of these former ambassadors knocked on the door and he asked to come in and watch,” she says. “Crazy how much some of them got away with.” Today she tells young women the story and they can hardly believe it.  

By 2010 Colleen Thouez had reached a verdict on the system she worked in. “In this arena, the interstate system, we will not see the types of changes needed for refugees and migrants in my lifetime,” she says. “It will never happen. So, it simply can’t be the only arena.” She decided to give up the security of her permanent position at the UN. “Everybody was looking at me like I was completely crazy.”  

Today, Colleen Thouez calls this time a major pivot in her life: “One of the biggest learning curves was to describe myself by the impact of the work, rather than the title that I have.” She adopted a new approach: identify challenges and use networks and connections to build new ecosystems for direct change. Her first step: “I’m going to leverage the UN for a new purpose: to create arenas for regular engagement with municipalities, mayors, and cities.” 

Colleen Thouez moved to the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), where governments meet annually to discuss the links between migration and development in an informal process outside the UN structure. She set up the Mayors Mechanism and the Mayors Migration Council (MMC), two structures that gave mayors and local governments a seat in UN migration talks. Cities, Colleen Thouez argues, “are also contributing to global policymaking, to better policymaking.” 

The pandemic once again shifted the scale of her work. While working with the Open Society Foundations, the former macro strategist went from the local to the individual: she built a network that got cash cards to families who had mixed immigration statuses and were therefore shut out of federal aid. “Policy is great, but I can also make a difference to one family,” Colleen Thouez says of this time. It also changed her approach to work: “That pivot to direct assistance, which I found very scary, means you don’t sleep for weeks.”    

Days after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she found herself in Paris, meeting French officials. The “super-connector” immediately grasped the chance: with a colleague, she began consulting Ukrainian communities directly. What she heard became Europe Prykhystok, pairing Ukrainian cities with towns in France, Germany, and Poland to bring children out of the war. For Colleen Thouez, this work carried a private echo: her own grandfather had been a ward of the French state after the First World War. 

Her newest network is the American university itself. As Vice President for Workforce Development at the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH), Thouez connects 90 public university systems, 1,200 campuses, and 13.9 million students to the employers and communities around them, designing programs that carry people from education into work. This time she links institutions to opportunity so that individuals can rise. American public universities were founded to serve their communities, she notes: “They must educate and support people.” 

As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Colleen Thouez studied how education can lead to employment, and how both can serve social and economic goals and strengthen democracy. It is the same question in a new arena, approached in the same way as always: "Bringing super-connectors together, those with great ideas and those with great resources." Underlying it is her conviction: “There’s a window of opportunity in which people who welcome others can bring them into a common project.”