Our Founder

A Paradoxical Beginning

Expat Valley was born from a profound paradox: we are building a solution that we sincerely hope will one day be obsolete. Founded in the Netherlands by Karlijn Jacobs, our work is a systemic response to a global reality: talent mobility has scaled faster than the human systems meant to support it.

The View from the Overpass

The seeds of Expat Valley were planted in 2010 on an overpass above a 14-lane street in Shanghai. Karlijn, then a Children & Family Therapist, found herself standing between the “mountains” of a new culture, far away from trusted loved ones, and the sudden loss of professional identity.

In that moment of uncertainty, she realized a critical gap: while global families often have access to top-tier logistics, they lack an ecosystem that protects their emotional continuity and belonging. This wasn’t just a personal struggle; it was a systemic failure.

From Awareness to Responsibility

Over the next two decades, Karlijn’s journey moved through the deep complexities of global life:

• Motherhood without a safety net: Navigating international birth, distance grandparents, childcare across cultures, and co-parenting during a split-family assignment.

• Clinical Leadership: Serving as a Clinic Director for an international team of multidisciplinary therapists and special educators, witnessing how a lack of support directly impacts child development and academic potential. Karlijn laid the foundation of a local ecosystem of healthcare and educational expertise, focused on international child safeguarding. 

• Systemic Insight: Transitioning to CEO of an international education firm, where she saw that multinational organizations were ready to invest in family wellbeing, but lacked the human-centric frameworks to do so effectively.

Our Final Metric

Today, Karlijn serves as the Ombudsperson for Global Children and Families. She founded Expat Valley to bridge the mismatch between global mobility frameworks and the local, human needs of children and families. We don’t measure success by the number of successful relocations, but by our Final Metric: the relaxed child, the included child, and the child who is free to be themselves. We advocate for a world where “Expat Valley” is no longer a service, but a global standard of living.