As the Senior Program Officer for the Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective, Michelle provides leadership for movement-led grantmaking that advances collective healing, collective infrastructure, and community land strategies, while strengthening movement power. This strategy addresses environmental and climate justice through a root cause analysis and vision for regenerative economies that protect life.
Michelle was a co-founding co-director at Movement Generation (MG) for 15 years until 2001. Most recently, they served as the Senior Fellow of Movement Alignment at Taproot Earth. Prior to that, she was the National Director of Campaigns at the Sierra Club.
As an MG collective member, Michelle played critical roles in MG’s Just Transition curriculum development & training, strategic planning & organizational development, and funder organizing. She led the first MG Just Transition retreat for funders in 2015 and was instrumental in launching Shake the Foundations, a space for funders to practice non-extractive movement-aligned investment.
In her role at MG, Michelle was a founding co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and helped to launch Reinvest in Our Power which works to reinvest stolen wealth into community-controlled economic transition. Michelle is a Kellogg Food Policy Fellow and Ashoka Fellow, and recently authored a piece in SSIR: How Movement Organizations Organized Funders.
Born and raised on Tongva land in Southern California, Michelle is a mama who has nurtured queer family and movement community on Ohlone land (aka Berkeley) over the last 20 years. She loves to kayak with her paddle pals, watch plants grow, heal with somatics, and read speculative fiction.
Photo by Brooke Anderson