Draft:Lucía Casanueva

Lucía Casanueva (Santander, 1975) is a Spanish journalist and entrepreneur. She founded PROA Comunicación agency in Madrid (2009) and is committed to promoting women and their leadership in business. She is a regular contributor to several magazines and newspapers.

Educational background
Lucía Casanueva's academic background has shaped her professional development. She completed her high school education in Vancouver, Canada.

She has a degree in Journalism from the University of Navarra and has completed several postgraduate courses in economics and business management at various universities and business schools, including IESE and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Journalistic career
Casanueva began her career as a journalist at the daily newspaper Expansión and continued at Actualidad Económica, where she had the opportunity to get to know much of the Spanish business community. Casanueva then worked in the communications sector, specifically at the Llorente y Cuenca agency and other multinational companies such as Kreab, Portocarrero and Edelman.

In 2008 she took part in the RTVE documentary "Al Filo de lo Imposible" (On the edge of the impossible). She went on a journey of several months with the team led by Sebastián Álvaro and Edurne Pasaban. The aim was to climb Manaslu, the 8th highest peak in the world at 8156m. Both the pre-trip training and the treks up to 5,000 metres, the hypoxia, the river crossings and the adaptation to scarcity were crucial to their subsequent human and professional development.

She also contributes to various media such as ABC, El Confidencial, Confilegal, El Diario Montañés, Forbes, El Debate, and El economista.

Her columns and collaborations deal with current political and economic issues from the point of view of communication and women's leadership. Casanueva is in favour of independent journalism, both economically and ideologically. She believes that the role of the journalist is to contrast the truth with the facts and to avoid disinformation, lies and manipulation.

Some of her articles:

 * La comunicación de crisis y la credibilidad de la medicina de urgencias (Crisis communication and the credibility of emergency medicine).
 * Benedicto XVI: una oda a la coherencia (Benedict XVI: an ode to coherence).
 * Isabel II y el imperio de la buena comunicación (Elizabeth II and the empire of good communication).
 * Hacia un nuevo modelo de liderazgo (Towards a new model of leadership)
 * Los empresarios como solución (Entrepreneurs as a solution).
 * La verdad es sexi (The truth is sexy).

Entrepreneur
When Lucía Casanueva returned to Madrid, having overcome all the challenges of the expedition Al filo de lo imposible, she was also able to start her own business at the start of the crisis caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

In 2009 she founded PROA Comunicación, a strategic consultancy, and senior talent company that functions as an outsourced communications department. She chose professionals with experience to minimise the problem of high turnover of young graduates in communication agencies.

In 2015, she formed a partnership with the lawyer Valvanuz Serna, and then began a period of expansion for the agency and the creation of alliances with other international agencies.

She has participated in different forums claiming the role of women and their leadership. In her view, businesswomen are overly self-critical and need to be better at managing their emotions, so that it does not affect their careers, as she believes women have a high capacity for work. Casanueva is a board member of the Woman Forward Foundation for Gender Equality, and a member of the International Women Presidents' Organisation, which promotes the role of women as entrepreneurs and leaders.

In 2015, she launched the PROA Observatory as a forum for debate on social impact issues, with the participation of prominent people from the political, business and cultural worlds. Since then, there has been a series of meetings with politicians, military, diplomatic and defence experts, judges, and business people.