Next Economy Now highlights the leaders who are taking a regenerative, bio-regional, equitable, transparent, and whole-systems approach to using business as a force for good.
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Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan is Co-Director of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project (MG). Since 2007, MG has been bridging the gap between our current social movement strategies and the scale of the unfolding ecological crisis. As a collective member, Michelle leads trainings, facilitates strategy sessions, and works with other groups to foster a just transition to local living economies. Michelle brings over a decade of experience pairing resilience and resistance in fostering a just food system as the founding director of the Center for Food and Justice and a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow. She organized community groups in South Los Angeles and family farmers from across California to forge model programs and policy campaigns to shift power in the food system. She was one of the early initiators of the Farm to School movement in the U.S. Under her leadership, the Center for Food and Justice organized high school students, parents, and cafeteria workers in a campaign for healthy school food in the Los Angeles Unified School District. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Michelle served as co-director of the School of Unity and Liberation from 2005-2008 before joining Movement Generation. She has a M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA and grew up in Southern California. Michelle is now setting roots in Berkeley where she gardens with the extended Movement Generation family and her two lively daughters. Contact Michelle: michelleATmovementgeneration.org
Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. Gopal is an active trainer with and serves on the boards of The Ruckus Societyand the Center for Story-based Strategy(formerly smartMeme). He also serves on the advisory boards of the International Accountability Project, and Catalyst Project. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy and empire. Gopal has been a campaigner for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition on human rights and environmental justice in the high-tech industry and the Oil Campaigner for Project Underground, a human rights and environmental rights organization which supported communities resisting oil and mining exploitation around the world. Gopal has been active in many people powered direct action movements, including the Global Justice/Anti-Globalization Movement, Direct Action to Stop the War, Mobilization for Climate Justice, Take Back the Land, and Occupy. Gopal is the father of two young direct action junkies, Ila Sophia and Kavi Samaka Orion, and lives in an intentional community with 9 adults, 8 kids and a bunch of chickens. Contact Gopal: gopalATmovementgeneration.org
Resources:
https://movementgeneration.org
LIFT Economy is an impact consulting firm whose mission is to create, model, and share a locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life.
Ryan Honeyman is a Partner at LIFT Economy and author of The B Corp Handbook: How to Use Business as a Force for Good (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). You can follow Ryan on Twitter @honeymanconsult or email him ryan@lifteconomy.com.