Dr. Claire Nelson is the Ideation Leader of The Futures Forum, a thought leadership practice which promotes and conducts strategic foresight and integral development consulting, with a particular interest in global challenges. She is also Ideation Leader and President of the Board for Development Foresight Institute, a think-do tank based in the Caribbean.
Dr. Nelson has been actively engaged in the business of international development for over thirty years at the Inter-American Development Bank, amassing experience in portfolio identification as well as the ideation and development of technical assistance programs across a wide variety of sectors including public sector modernization, private sector development, community development, and trade development.
The first female engineer of African descent hired by the IDB, Dr. Nelson was a diversity pioneer and a thought leader serving to initiate many programs such as the Bank’s work in the private sector of Guyana and the hinterlands of Suriname, intellectual property in the Caribbean, strategic foresight in development; and development with equity for Blacks in Latin America.
She served as Vice President of the 2,000+ member Staff Association, and initiated the first TEDxIDB, as well as staff enhancement activities ‘Peak Performance Protocols’. A trailblazer, she was honored with the IDB’s prestigious Ortiz Mena Award for placing the topic of social exclusion due to race and ethnicity on the agenda of the Washington international finance institutions.
As a result of her pioneering work on development with equity for Blacks in Latin America, Nelson was invited to the prestigious Salzburg Seminar four times including serving as Faculty at the Session on Leadership Across Cultural Boundaries and Geographic Borders in 2003. She was named a Fellow at the Bellagio Consultation on the UN World Conference on Racism (UNWCAR), organized by Global Rights, which brought together 40 global leaders to construct a vision for the outcomes of the UNWCAR
She is also an performance artiste, storyteller and the award-winning playwright, of the hit comedy “Resident Alien”.