Diego Merizalde

Diego Merizalde has built his career in an intersection between public sector projects, private consulting, and politics, with extensive experience building social justice strategies and managing projects with cultural and philanthropic institutions. 

Diego was the director of a multi-year technology-based cultural program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and successfully scaled nationwide in 1200+ public libraries across Colombia. Diego built key partnerships to expand the program’s social impact. Among them, he partnered with Historypin to build what became the largest, richest and most diverse digital community-based photo archive in Colombia. A thorough recount of this intervention can be found in a chapter he co-authored with Jon Voss (2019), called Massive Digital Community Archives in Colombia: An International Partnership Toward Peace, in The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites. 

He also led the design, pitch, and implementation of a partnership with Libraries Without Borders, to deploy mobile public libraries with high impact programming in 20 vastly underserved rural jurisdictions, created to concentrate FARC ex-combatants after the Country’s 2016 Peace Agreement. This project was awarded the best public intervention of 2017 by the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos. 

Diego has also been a management and ESG consultant, and a professor of economics. He was the coordinator of a presidential campaign in Colombia, where he also served as policy advisor to build a transformative platform for education and equity. He holds a BA in business administration from CESA, in Bogota, and a Master’s degree in public policy from the London School of Economics and Sciences-Po, Paris.