Director and Founder Centre for Well-being and Sustainability (USA and Latin America) Centro Lyra (Venezuela)
Miami, Florida
Mireya Vargas is a passionate agent of change, a social innovator and a researcher. As Director and Founder of Centro Lyra (Venezuela) and Centre for Well-being and Sustainability (USA, Latin America), she has worked to promote innovation and the creation of knowledge in areas of personal well-being and sustainable human development. With an experience of 30 years in the development field, she has designed, identified, monitored, evaluated and learnt from more than 3,500 initiatives promoted by organizations of civil society, corporations, private companies and local governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, working in ecosystems of cooperation and promotion of sustainable human development.
As a social entrepreneur of Ashoka, since 1997, a global network of social agents of change, Mireya has participated globally in important projects of innovation and research into topics of poverty, personal well-being, individual and collective psychology, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility, using various approaches.
Her interest in the link between the sociological and the psychological has led her to research focused on themes such as individual psychology and its psychological complexities, the individual and his collective unconscious, personal well-being measurement, and on social and collective complexities. Mireya has dedicated part of her life to teaching at the university level in different universities in Venezuela (UCAB, USB, UNIMET). She has also published works on themes of corporate social responsibility and on social innovation and the creation of knowledge in development projects. In 2002 Mireya received the British Petroleum Helios Award for Social Innovation.
She earned her BS in Sociology and MS in Economics from Universidad Católica Andres Bello (Venezuela). Mireya enjoys spending time with her husband, Pablo, traveling, taking photographs, good reading, cooking and tasting good wines, going to concerts and plays, and listening to classical music.