Let’s Introduce: our new Board of Trustees member Annick Mantoua
Our Board of Trustees (BoT) has a new member! Joining us as a trustee is Annick Mantoua, Managing Director of Pakhuis de Zwijger. Annick is a driving force behind various organisations in sustainable development, civil society and international cooperation. We spoke to her about embracing sustainability, promoting change locally, and exploring new definitions of feminism.
Born in South Korea, and raised in the Netherlands, Annick Mantoua is a passionate and experienced leader in her community and networks. As the Managing Director of Pakhuis de Zwijger, making a positive contribution to a more socially sustainable and just-world has been a recurring theme in her career. For Annick, bringing unique and diverse perspectives together is essential to addressing social and environmental challenges. By building sisterhood and allyship with women in leadership positions she supports and represents a shift towards gender equity in management roles.
From business to sustainability: Annick’s career shift
Annick’s background is in marketing, business and education, which has equipped her with a sharp skill set for bringing meaningful change to society, by working together with various sectors. After her first job in consulting, she rapidly switched her career focus, to bring about a positive impact on the environment and society.
What exactly inspired this shift from a more traditionally corporate sector career path to one focused on social justice and environmental sustainability? “I felt that contributing to a profit-only aspiration for a company was not satisfying” she explains. Instead, she realised that she wanted to be involved in grassroots community building and find societal meaning in her job.
Annick’s passion for social impact did not come out of nowhere, however. Since a young age, she felt she tended to question things around her.
“I was confronted at a very young age with some personal challenges, which made me sensitive to notice or question injustice. For example, I was adopted into the Netherlands, where I was of course very physically different to my family and the people around me. Growing up in a different world far away from my roots, knowing my life had started differently than other kids around me, led me to question basic things at an early age. ”
Making waves in sustainability: highlights from Annick’s career so far
From co-organising a community project for young people in the Hague, to Closing the Loop, a social enterprise making mobile phones more circular, Annick spends a lot of time thinking about sustainable consumption, as well as the importance of involving young people and women in global solutions. At De a nonprofit where Annick worked for almost 5 years prior to joining Pakhuis de Zwijger, Annick managed to grow her excitement about improving her local environment in a tangible way; by focusing on promoting biodiversity, urban greening and sustainable food consumption in her home city, Amsterdam.
Now, through her work as the director of Pakhuis de Zwijger, Annick also found her way to the board of WECF by meeting Marieke van Doorninck and Aniek Moonen, current BoT co-chairs. And since their acquaintanceship, “my online algorithm kept bringing WECF to me, due to our related themes’’.

WECF and Feminism: Annicks role on the BoT
What Annick finds most appealing about WECF is our focus on supporting and elevating women to decision making spaces, and the creation of a global network. Indeed, Annick is involved in a network with other women in corporate leadership positions and finds comfort in the sisterhood found there to advocate for equal pay and political decision-making.
While Annick feels that ecofeminism and feminism are a new topic for her, she attributes this to the patriarchal system and is eager to learn. Indeed, she currently defines herself as a “feminist in progress”, aligning with our philosophy that a large part of feminism is an ongoing learning journey to keep up with intersectional revisions and changes in our socio-political climate.
Impressed by WECF’s broad range of themes and projects, Annick is brainstorming how she might support WECF in a tangible way, including how to enhance our communication with her external point of view:
“I want to see how my ‘newness’ can add to the story of WECF and allow for it to be transformed into a compact message and reach broader audiences. WECF’s size and complexity is what makes it wonderful but also challenging to really know it quickly. As the world is quick, I would like to also learn how to communicate about WECF in the best, understandable way.”
For this reason, Annick feels a major part of her role on the WECF BoT will be to support WECF in connecting with other women’s networks and leveraging these networks to address environmental challenges and system change in an efficient, compact and impactful way using an inclusive, intersectional approach: “If you support women, you support system change”.
What gives Annick joy and hope for the future?
In short….
“I get my joy from the energy of young people. Their enormous drive to contribute to and improve our world is what motivates me to make it my job too”.
Welcome to WECF and our Board of Trustees, Annick!