Laura de Franchis – Founder of The Alternatives Factory

“Alternatives for all: better systems for people and planet.”

Meet Laura

• She names ‘questioning’ as her core skill. As a coach she asks the questions that help someone else find their own answer, and as an evaluator she asks the questions that show whether change is really happening.
• Laura opens up about surviving a suicide bombing in Islamabad on 5 October 2009, her first day in Pakistan with the UN, and the post-traumatic stress disorder she was diagnosed with only in 2023, 14 years later. A reminder, she says, that trauma is so normalised in humanitarian work that its cost can stay hidden for years.
• Leaving the UN in 2023 meant losing a built-in identity: “I work for the United Nations” no longer works as an answer to “what do you do?”. She describes the transition to running her own business as exciting yet destabilising – financially and personally.
• She traces her shift toward coaching back to a conversation with a coach that reframed her sense of being trapped inside the UN system into a sense of choice. This shift eventually led her to train as a coach herself, and to found her own company: The Alternatives Factory.
• The thread linking it all is social justice. The upside-down ‘A’ in her logo is the mathematical symbol for “for all”: The Alternatives Factory looks for alternatives to inequality and injustice, for all people, and for the planet we depend on.
• Today, she channels that same reframe in her work with others: helping people move from feeling stuck to seeing the choices in front of them, one good question at a time.

Sector

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) for social justice: fundamental principles and rights at work, agriculture and food security, climate justice

• Laura’s craft is monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). Through The Alternatives Factory she offers MEL, theories of change and strategic facilitation, and coaching to purpose-driven organisations and people, all centred on creating meaningful and lasting change for people and the planet.
• Laura works in the fields she has already spent two decades in: fundamental principles and rights at work (child labour, forced labour, fair recruitment), agriculture and food security, and more recently, climate justice. Her clients include the UN, NGOs, and grassroots initiatives, also in The Hague. She combines quantitative and qualitative skills, evidence-based stories of change, and increasingly advises clients on how to measure impact for new types of donors, including foundations and impact-driven businesses.
• Like many freelancers in this sector, she is also exploring different kinds of funding for The Alternatives Factory, including more community-level work in The Hague as a way to root her livelihood in the place she lives while continuing to work for social justice. She works in English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.

Skills

Want to find out how Laura built The Alternatives Factory?

• Laura trained as an agronomist and soil scientist in Montpellier and Wageningen. Her first jobs were on environmental statistics, rural development, and gender advocacy across the Mediterranean, and it was there she realised she wanted to work in social justice.
• She left a stable job in the south of France to volunteer with the Red Cross before joining Action Against Hunger in a remote district of Nepal, managing food and cash distributions, irrigation, and agricultural projects.
• Seeking bigger-picture impact, she joined the World Food Programme in 2007 and spent twelve years there, building the evidence base for food security programmes in Laos, Pakistan and Rwanda, then leading global M&E learning from Rome and, finally, the regional M&E team for Asia and the Pacific from Bangkok.
• Her passion for coaching grew alongside her day job. Certified as a coach in 2018 and accredited by the International Coaching Federation in 2019 (Professional Certified Coach since 2022), she began coaching and facilitating UN teams while still at WFP and the ILO and set up The Alternatives Factory in France in 2020.
• She then moved to the International Labour Organization in Geneva, leading monitoring and evaluation for fundamental principles and rights at work: child labour, forced labour and trafficking, fair recruitment, discrimination and freedom of association.
• In December 2022, after more than fifteen years in the UN system, she left. COVID had brought a growing sense of disconnection from her own impact and a feeling of being a replaceable cog, and when staff were called back to their duty stations she could not return for family reasons. Dutch-Italian by background, she moved The Alternatives Factory to the Netherlands, the country she had lived in as a child, in 2023, and made it her full-time work.

Advice & Tips

“Just ask your brain: how can I integrate what I care about into what I do? It will come to you.”

• Don’t wait for permission to be creative inside a rigid system. Look for the small openings where your other interests can find a foothold.
• Ask how you will know it worked before you start. The answer changes what you do.
• Talk about mental health openly, and push organisations to build in regular check-ins. The normalisation of stress and trauma in high-pressure sectors can hide real harm for years.
• Accept that you can’t do everything yourself; build with people and within structures you can hand things off to.
• Hope matters most exactly when things feel like they’re collapsing. It is what lets you keep acting.
• Clarity often comes after the leap, not before it: You don’t need a finished pitch or a five-year plan to leave something that isn’t working.

• Curriculum Vitae

  The Alternatives Factory, France then The Hague – Founder, MEL Consultant, Facilitator & Coach [2020–present]
  International Labour Organization (ILO), Geneva – Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work [2019–2022]
  World Food Programme, Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok – Regional Head of Monitoring and Evaluation [2017–2019]
  World Food Programme, Headquarters, Rome – Global Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor [2013–2017]
  World Food Programme, Laos, Pakistan and Rwanda – Head of Vulnerability Analysis, Mapping and M&E [2007–2013]
  Action Against Hunger, Nepal – Food Security Expert [2006–2007]
  Centre Méditerranéen de l’Environnement, France – International Programme Officer [2003–2006]
  Plan Bleu pour la Méditerranée, France – Natural Resources Programme Officer [2000–2003]

  Education and certifications
  International Coaching Federation – Associate Certified Coach (ACC) [2019], Professional Certified Coach (PCC) [2022]
  Wageningen University – MSc Erosion, Soil and Water Conservation [2000]
  Montpellier SupAgro – Ingénieur Agronome [1999]

Connection to the Hub

Laura has been a member of The Hague Humanity Hub since 2020, and an active contributor ever since, mostly through the climate justice community and the Hub’s own strategy work:

• Featured guest speaker at The Handshake as part of the Ready2Engage: Pathways to Climate Justice programme (2026)
• Co-created and facilitated two arts-based workshops for the Just Peace Festival with Gregg the Artivist: “WTF?! (Worried about the Future)”, moving participants from climate overwhelm to collective action, and “Leverage Lines”, using systems thinking and movement to help people find where they can shift the system they are part of. (2025)
• Advised Hub team on strategic thinking and the development of the Hub’s theory of change (2024–2025)
• Co-designed and facilitated sessions for the Hub’s climate justice community including the first climate community meetup using Open Space Technology. (2024)
• Facilitated online session of the Hub’s Investing in Peace Critical Dialogue in 2025.
• Actively supports the Hub’s mental health and wellbeing initiatives. Active member of the climate justice community. More to come…