In 2018, I had the privilege to be asked to join a group of family and friends on a trip to Uganda to see wild gorillas in Bwindi Natural Forest. "Uganda? Gorillas?" I thought at the time. I usually lived absorbed by the financial markets, I work surrounded by the endless hum of computers and adrenaline induced highs and lows. Trekking through the forest without Blackberry cover to see gorillas wasn't exactly on my bucket list at the time.
What I didn't expect was that the trip would become a turning point in my life. The day I came back to Zürich, as I entered my flat overlooking the lake, all I could think was "so that I can live as I do, they have to live as they do". That evening, I decided I had to act. I began deep diving into sustainability and, in 2021, I joined the Credit Suisse Chief Sustainability Officer's team, where I had the privilege to work with some of the world's most highly recognized sustainability experts.
As I delved deeper and deeper into different subjects, I was able to discover the topics that inspired me the most, after all, we can't all focus on everything at the same time. I began zeroing in on the blue economy, biodiversity, and most recently, deep tech. Being a finance professional, my way to contribute was to support the deployment of investment capital into those topics. But it wasn't enough. In 2020, after suggesting a thematic fund range to engage the Next Gen which was all but ignored, I set up this website and thought I'd launch a fund, The Millennial Lobby Fund, to invest into impact projects myself, but then in July 2021 I was hired into the CS CSO team... and that was that. No matter how much I tried to pull away from banking, banking always ended up pulling me back in...
Now let's fast forward to 2023. I have now left the busy world of banking to focus on my own business through which I aim to provide integrated wealth management and fintech solutions to family offices and asset managers. Amongst other things, I will be supporting them to establish sustainable investment frameworks and analytical models to conduct ESG research, but also to take a leap of faith into that great unknown that blockchain is for many of us Gen X.
As my calendar is no longer filled with endless internal meetings, I have also now started to informally collaborate with Fundación Trifolium in Spain on some of their conservation projects and began dipping my toe into the world of alternative therapies, breathing exercises, yoga... and even an ice bath or two. And so now I come back to this little pet project, The Millennial Lobby, a platform for engagement through which I will organize fundraising activities and volunteering engagements.
Join the evolution...
Melanie Knowles
Founder, The Millennial Lobby
December 2023
