Biography
Pat Gallardo Dwyer
Founder and Director, The Purpose Business
Pat is the Founder of The Purpose Business (TPB), who guide leaders to evolve business as a force for good. By helping organisations articulate, activate and embed both purpose and sustainability into their business strategy and operations, they have become trusted partners of blue-chip Asian companies, rising start ups and long-established non profit organisations across Asia Pacific.
Pat has more than two decades of sustainability leadership experience. She has held pioneering Chief Sustainability Officer roles – as the first Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability Manager at Ayala Land, the Philippines’ most esteemed land developer. Then, as the first Global Head of CSR & Sustainability for Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, she reached landmark organisational milestones including becoming the first Asian hotel chain to be recognised in the Hang Seng Sustainability and Dow Jones Sustainability Indeces and the first Asian hotel chain to ban the service of shark’s fin, back in 2014.
A passionate speaker on purpose and leadership, responsible business, women’s empowerment and inclusion, she regularly hosts and moderates the highest-level panels and events including the Obama Foundation Leaders’ summit and sessions at the World Economic Forum.
Pat is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and sits on the Global Steering Committee of the Prince of Wales’s Business & Sustainability Programme. She also serves as faculty and tutor across a number of CISL Executive Education programmes. She is a member of the Shared Care Collective, the sustainability advisory board of Sanofi Consumer Healthcare and also sits on the board of directors of Enrich, a Hong -Kong based charity that works on financial literacy of migrant domestic workers.
She was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2015 and remains a fellow of the Asia Society and the Royal Society of Arts. She holds an MA in Globalisation & Governance, certificates in Transformational Leadership from the University of Oxford and Global Leadership & Public Policy for the 21st Century from the Harvard Kennedy School.
