By empowering vulnerable people – especially women – to build homes they want to live in, Elizabeth believes we will also make them safer. To achieve this, over the last two decades, she has led Build Change to work with global NGOs and governments to shape policy, with leading technology companies to scale engineering solutions through AI and other innovations, and with microfinance institutions and banks to expand access to financing for both homeowners and entrepreneurs.

This work is evidence of the simple but powerful theory of change Elizabeth has laid out: resilient housing requires people, money, and technology. Her transformation of these from barriers to systems change into enablers of it began when she was a Fulbright Fellow in India.  There she studied and assisted with housing reconstruction following the 2001 Kachchh, Gujarat earthquake.