Nicole Bastien

Nicole is the founder and driving force behind What Matters. She started this initiative with a simple but radical intention: to bring humanity back into the economy. For her, it’s not about fixing systems from the top down—it’s about reconnecting what’s already alive and working beneath the surface. That means bridging capital and community, honoring what’s often invisible, and creating space for people and ideas that hold the future in their hands—but rarely get the opportunity to share their lived experience in boardrooms.

At What Matters, Nicole holds the long view. She leads with vision, shapes the narrative, builds alliances across sectors, stewards funding relationships, and tends to the often invisible threads that make deep change possible. She works at the edge where intuition meets strategy, where care meets clarity, and where bold ideas can be rooted in real soil.

Nicole also founded the CO-LAB for Future Economics, a non-profit foundation that sustains and expands the work of What Matters through research, collaboration, and ecosystem building. Alongside that, she runs her Fine Advisory, supporting entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders to shape the next chapter of the economy. Her advisory work moves her clients from vision to impact, from potential to presence.

With a background that stretches from social work to industry lobbying to executive leadership and systems advising, Nicole brings a rare kind of range—deeply human, quietly fierce, and always tuned into the larger shift. She doesn’t just talk about transformation. She lives it, holds space for it, and helps others move through it with authenticity, integrity, and intent.

She shares her thinking in essays, TEDx talks, live podcasts, and quiet moments of connection—on the female architecture of future organizations, regenerative entrepreneurship, conscious leadership, and building an economy where people and our planet matter.