Santiago Mejía

Santiago Mejía is a Colombian Mexican social psychologist and communications strategist, who led Ashoka Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean’s Social Ecosystems work for over eight years, designing and scaling ecosystem-based approaches to social innovation. His work focused on mobilizing collaboration among social entrepreneurs, governments, and communities to advance systems change and embed changemaking as a societal norm.

His commitment to agency and peacebuilding began during his work at the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín, where he engaged with processes of collective memory and conflict resolution, and continued with Nuevas Huellas, a youth-led initiative he founded through Rotaract, where he co-designed a positive peace program supporting youth to develop leadership skills and launch community-based projects through fostering belonging. These experiences shaped his long-term focus on individuals as drivers of systemic change.

At Ashoka, Santiago codesigned and led Transforming Territories, a place-based methodology that activated local ecosystems by integrating social innovators, private sector, and public institutions into shared strategies for sustainable development. He serves on boards and advisory committees for regional organizations advancing social impact, sustainability, and emerging technologies across Latin America.

Through his work across territories and academic research, Santiago has developed a growing interest in how experiences in video games and online communities shape identity, habits, and agency, which then influence individuals’ actions in physical spaces. He studies how these digital experiences act as formative practices for changemaking and how they can be integrated into territorial strategies and public policy to support inclusive, lifelong peacebuilding.

As a Rotary Peace Fellow, Santiago seeks to strengthen the integration of digital cultures into international development policy and design frameworks that expand pathways for agency across both physical and digital spaces, recognizing the lifelong potential of everyday digital practices to cultivate peacebuiliding, collaboration, and systemic impact.