Pathbreaking. Empowering. Impact-driven.

Integrating her work in the private, public and social sectors, Patricia forges pathbreaking solutions to economically empower women and youth. Over the years, she has created opportunities for 200,000+ people in developed and emerging markets to reach their earning, learning, and serving goals.

Patricia is an ethical fashion advisor and influencer, working at the nexus of the fashion customer, fashion entrepreneur, and policymaker.

Patricia is Founder and Chief Curator of Women for Women’s Wear, a B2C ethical fashion network of women fashion customers who love clothes and care who makes them. The Women for Women’s Wear Network makes it easier for women in the US to find high quality fashion designed by women that is ethically and sustainably made.

She helps women designers and makers build businesses that create good quality jobs, improve productivity and profitability, preserve artisanal traditions, and minimize environmental impact. Ultimately the goal is to increase the incomes of these women-led businesses and the women who work for them and strengthen their voices.

For example, she serves as Global Advisory Board member of World Collective, the global digital ecosystem for sustainable and scalable fashion supply chains. Its digital marketplace improves efficiency, cuts costs, and reduces waste and pollution for textile suppliers and brands.

She works with federal and state policymakers to strengthen laws and regulations for garment workers and climate justice in the fashion industry through nonprofits such as Remake.

Patricia’s work on ethical and sustainable fashion builds on her senior executive roles in economic empowerment and entrepreneurship for women and youth at Save the Children, the International Youth Foundation, and in her own consulting practice, Consulting for a Better World.

Patricia provides strategic, management and fundraising consulting to global and local nonprofits, foundations, governments and socially conscious corporations in developed and emerging markets, most notably the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as well as Ukraine.

She is a thought leader and frequent writer and speaker for platforms including World Collective Insights, Functional Fabric Fair Expert Talks, and the Next Billion blog.

At the World Bank, she pioneered the integration of citizen voice into public sector reform lending programs and the first transparency and accountability work at the Bank. She developed the Service Delivery Surveys that are still used today by the Bank and its client governments. These evaluations quantify and assess, from the citizen-user point of view, how well public services are delivered and the extent of corruption in the system.

Using her experience in structured finance at international banks on Wall Street such as Fuji Bank and National Westminster Bank, and her work in emerging markets, Patricia was invited to advise the government of Ukraine, where she lived in 1994. As part of a Harvard Kennedy School team, she analyzed and made recommendations, adopted by the new democratic Ukrainian government, on the privatization of state-owned industries immediately following the country’s independence from the Soviet Union.

Patricia served as a consultant to Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize winning pioneer of the microfinance movement, and other members of the UN expert group on women and finance in preparation for the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing.

In addition to extensive travel to design and manage programs, Patricia has lived in Ukraine, Ethiopia and Japan, working on their programs in economic and educational development.

Patricia holds a Masters of Public Policy degree in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from Brown University. She speaks French and Japanese.

She is also a dancer and performs with regional companies in the Metro Washington, DC area.

For more details on youth development and economic empowerment programs she has designed and led, please visit her digital c.v.: patricialangan.com and LinkedIn.

All photographs copyright Patricia E. Langan, except as noted.