Guillaume Capelle

Guillaume Capelle, born 15 October 1987 in Paris, is a French social entrepreneur and impact investor, expert in international migration and climate.

He founded the NGO SINGA in 2012, where he became president and then international director. He is also co-founder and president of the J’accueille association. In 2023, he joined IMPACT Partners as managing director.

Biography

Early life and education

Born in Paris, he grew up in Brittany with his two younger brothers, a mother who was a master framing artisan, and a father who ran a food industry company. From the age of 12, he undertook language study trips to England, Italy, and the United States.

After finishing school in Rennes, he hesitated between studying architecture and design but ultimately chose to pursue International Relations with the goal of becoming a diplomat.

At 18, he began studies at the Institut d’études des relations internationales (ILERI) in Paris. Concurrently, through correspondence, he began a law degree at the Sorbonne. In 2010, he graduated with a dual Master’s degree from ILERI and the Université Pierre Mendès France (Grenoble 2) in Management, specializing in international security and defense.

Professional experience

He began his professional career in Sydney at Amnesty International Australia, where he worked pro bono as a legal assistant for asylum seekers, and evenings and weekends in the hospitality sector. After six months, he took on coordination of serious human rights violation cases as a full-time employee.

Returning to France in 2011, he decided to launch, with Nathanael Molle, an NGO to finance refugee entrepreneurship and change perceptions of exile. Together, they founded SINGA.

In 2012, he also created his first strategy and communication consulting firm. He conducted a mission for the Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI) where he led and promoted a network of citizens and professionals from Europe’s working-class neighborhoods in Birmingham, Lisbon, Montreuil, and Palermo.

From 2015 onward, while Nathanael Molle and Alice Barbe shared leadership of SINGA in France, he was responsible for its international development.

In that role, he supported the launch of SINGA in Morocco, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Luxembourg. He established a “commons” culture: tools and methods to be shared open source within the international SINGA network and beyond, with citizen collectives and external organizations.

Through its international network of incubators, SINGA has created an ecosystem of thousands of refugee entrepreneurs and social enterprises mobilized for refugee inclusion. Notable examples include Carbon Mobile, Meet my Mama, Kaoukab, Konexio, the Observatory of Refugee Camps, Each One, Frello, and Caracole.

In 2021, Guillaume Capelle initiated the Start In Europe ecosystem: the largest gathering of incubators for refugee and exiled entrepreneurs on the European continent.

In 2022, he co-authored, with Benoît Hamon (then new CEO of SINGA), Elisabeth Laville (CEO of Utopies), and Stéphanie Senlis (consultant at Utopies), a Charter for the Inclusion of Refugees and Exiles in the Workplace. The aim was to form a coalition of companies—such as Accor, Danone, Generali, and L’Oréal—ready to engage on this issue.

At the same time, he presented a new vision of finance, focused on refugee entrepreneurs and innovations in the newcomer inclusion sector, at ChangeNOW and VivaTech. To implement this vision, he joined Impact Partners in 2023 as managing director to launch the first investment fund for newcomer integration in Europe.

Intercultural innovations

Within SINGA, he developed a peer-to-peer method, inspired by the collaborative economy, which generated numerous relational innovations between refugees and members of their host societies.

From its inception, he envisioned, alongside Nathanael Molle, “Buddy” connections between a refugee and a French host for linguistic and cultural exchanges.

Subsequently, he worked on designing the platform Comme à la maison (CALM) for hosting refugees in private homes. CALM, now “J’accueille,” enabled thousands of long-term stays for refugee individuals and families in France, facilitating their integration.

In 2017, he conceived Kiwanda, a coworking space for social-impact entrepreneurs, with Samuel Grzybowski (then head of Coexister).

Publications

Guillaume Capelle appears in the 2016 book I am with them by photographer Anne A-R, as well as in the 2021 essay On ne naît pas engagé, on le devient by activist Alice Barbe. He is also featured in the novel Mohammad, my mother and me by writer and director Benoît Cohen (2018).

He is cited as an expert in reference works such as La personne apprenante by Étienne Collignon (2019) and Radical and Fluid: Contemporary Mobilizations by Réjane Sénac (2021). In the same year, he was interviewed by Cyrielle Hariel and Sylvain Raymond for their book Our Reasons for Being – Toward a Sustainable and More Humane Society and in Lumières ! With Perspectives on Engagement.

As an author, he contributed chapters including “Migration and Environment” in RAMSES 2013 – Governing Today? edited by Thierry de Montbrial and Philippe Moreau Defarges, and a chapter in In the Neighborhoods, Equality Is Now! edited by Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Atias. He also co-authored the note “Talents Without Borders,” published by Utopies and SINGA in 2022. In 2023, he wrote the chapter “Migration Is Humanism” in Les Utopiennes, stories from 2043 published by La Mer Salée.

Distinctions

In 2017, he was included in Forbes Europe’s “30 Under 30” list in the Law & Policy category.

In 2018, he was elected “Minister of Foreign Affairs” of the ideal Social & Solidarity Economy government by Carenews readers.

He was the patron of the 2018 graduating class of École 3A Paris, joining a distinguished list including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jacques Delors, Raymond Barre, Sandra Fuentes, and Bernard Kouchner.

Between 2018 and 2019, he was consecutively selected for three “tech for good” innovator support programs: Ashoka’s Share it, Microsoft’s Share AI, and Numa in New York.

In 2020, he was featured among the 47 young entrepreneurs and activists in the “New Photo of the Century” by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, published in L’OBS.