Geneva-born Noëlle Demole, founder and CEO of the NGO Shere Khan Youth Protection, has her hands full. She is Anti-Money Laundering and Compliance Officer at Julius Baer Bank and runs her NGO while pursuing a PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Your secret? planning and self-organization.
Noëlle Demole sees her life as a mission to fight organized crime and injustice. “All the things I’m doing at the same time are connected and serve a larger purpose,” she says.
However, it was not always clear to her what she wanted to achieve with her life. When she finished school, her grandfather advised her to go to India – an idea that would change her whole life. Demole followed the suggestion and stayed there for a month to help in an orphanage with 120 children. “I have never forgotten these children,” says the 29-year-old. “That’s when my life started to have a purpose – to help children in India.”
When she returned to Geneva to study International Relations at the EU Business School, she had already set her sights on doing humanitarian work in India. After her bachelor’s degree, Demole discovered her second passion while doing an internship in compliance management at EFG Private Bank. “I loved the job of making sure the bank wasn’t moving dirty money from drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorist financing, tax evasion, or other illegal and criminal activities,” said Demole.
She combined her two passions, humanitarian work and compliance, and decided to pursue a Masters in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University. “We negotiate constantly and at all times,” she says. “I realized that the ability to communicate and manage conflict was central to both my dream in India and my work at the bank.”
Parallel to her master’s degree, Demole founded her NGO Shere Khan Youth Protection in 2018. The idea was to help homeless people in India and give them access to education. The problem at the orphanage where Demole started when he was 18 is that the children are thrown out of the orphanage at the age of 16 to make room for newcomers. This means that without a proper education and without the necessary skills to find a job, these children have to live on the streets, often driving them into crime. “This is where we come in,” explains Demole. “Whatever these children need and want to achieve with their lives, we fund it.”
The long-term goal The NGO’s goal is to give a total of 1,000 students access to an education. In the four years that the organization has been active, the team of seven (four live and work in India, three are based in Switzerland) have been able to help 305 students. Demole says the NGO needs between 50,000 and 60,000 CHF per year, which is managed through donations and fundraising events.
For her personal future, Demole is striving for a sustainable anchoring of the three pillars of her life – “Compliance work, NGO, PhD” (she is currently doing her doctorate in criminology at the University of Cambridge). She knows, according to Demole, that her life and work today is only the first step and that it is now important to stay focused and motivated – in order to really make something understandable in the end.
Noelle Demole
…the 29-year-old Swiss national is AML Compliance Officer at Bank Julius Baer and founder of Shere Khan Youth Protection. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge and completed her Masters in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University.