Our Story
Simon Global Consultancy's approach was shaped by lived experience — specifically, my experience growing up on Aruba, a small Caribbean island where the ocean teaches you about rhythm and persistence, where communities are tight-knit and everyone's story is woven into the collective narrative.
Chapter 1: The Realization
Growing up between Aruba and the Netherlands — the island's former colonizer — meant learning early about the tensions between belonging and displacement, between local knowledge and imposed systems, between what is valued and what is erased. I saw these as daily negotiations of identity and power.
In 2015, an HR Manager position took me to Suriname's rich culture. It’s heterogeneous population revealed something profound: the communities navigating colonial legacies were not problems to be solved. They were experts to be learned from.
This realization became the seed of what Simon Global Consultancy would become: a research practice that positions communities as knowledge holders.
Chapter 2:
Building the Method
What started as intuition needed structure and language. In 2017, I enrolled in the master's program in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This is where the methodology that now defines Simon Global Consultancy took shape: ethnographic research, grounded storytelling, and decolonial practice.
My master's research brought these principles to life. I returned to Aruba to work with the Venezuelan population, people navigating unimaginable political and socio-economic turmoil. Rather than studying them as "subjects," I listened to their stories, documented their resilience, and analyzed how policies failed them while communities sustained them.
This research — presented at the international conference Sharing Stories of Island Life and Global Engagement — established what would become our core approach: research that centers lived experience, challenges systems of power, and translates these experiences to policy makers, academia and the general public.
When the United Nations came calling, we knew exactly what kind of consultancy we would build.
“No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.”
— Ruth Benedict
(Female Anthropologist)
Chapter 3: 2020 - Imagening a different globe
In 2020, during the pandemic, Simon Global Consultancy was founded with a vision for how research and the world could be different. While the consultancy began with me, my laptop, and contracts with the United Nations for Migration (IOM), it was always about building something bigger.
Those early UN projects took us across the Caribbean: Aruba, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Curaçao, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Maarten, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Ten countries. Fifteen research reports. Hundreds of meaningful conversations.
But what mattered more than the numbers were the relationships we built. Each project reinforced what we already knew. We are here to learn, amplify, and advocate alongside communities. By working with them, we help make knowledge visible to those who need to hear it.
This is ultimately how Simon Global Consultancy works. We assemble mixed teams that include community researchers, local knowledge holders, people with lived experience, and university students who bring fresh perspectives while learning decolonial research methods in practice.
Core Values
There are two important values from which I work: sincere love for the world and the people who inhabit it, and immense passion for my profession. These values have been instilled in me from a very young age. In 1995, my father (A), a hotel sales manager, received a silver award from the American Resort Development Association celebrating “Leading us to Prosperity”. My mother (Q), then a news reporter, interviewed him on his sales and marketing philosophy.
Our Team
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Manisha Nash
Research Assistant
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Suzy Palmer-Smith
Research Assistant
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Agnese Bardelli
Research Assistant