Gretchen Steidle Wallace is founder of Global Grassroots, which provides mind-body trauma healing, conscious leadership skills, and social entrepreneurship training to help the world’s most vulnerable women become agents of change.
Wallace has spent more than a decade training in the fields of personal transformation, meditation, engaged Buddhism, and alternative healing. As a therapeutic practitioner of Integrative Breathwork, she works with those dealing with trauma from war and sexual violence.
Wallace's inspiration for her work with women in developing countries first stirred in her as a child when her military family was transferred to the Philippines, where she discovered the difficulties of poverty.
From 1996 to 1999, Wallace worked in international project finance for PMD International, Inc. a boutique investment banking firm specializing in infrastructure development in poor countries. Later, while earning her MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College she helped found what is now Tuck's Center for Business and Society.
She then joined Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, an international nonprofit organization advancing the profession of social entrepreneurship. She was responsible for leading the launch of an incubator for social entrepreneurs and was invited to direct Ashoka's sister organization, Youth Venture.
Wallace is a producer of the three-time Emmy-nominated documentary, The Devil Came on Horseback, a film about her brother's tenure as a military observer in Darfur, Sudan, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. She is also coauthor of her brother's memoir, The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur.
Wallace was honored by World Business Magazine and Shell as one of the "Top International 35 Women Under 35." In 2010, she was chosen as a CNN Hero working in Haiti after the earthquake there. In 2011, she was chosen one of seven Remarkable Women of the World by New Hampshire Magazine.