Biography

Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, Kellogg Food & Society Fellow (2004-06) is Co-Director of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project (MG) and Co-Director of the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and Our Power Campaign. Since 2007, MG has been bridging the gap between our current social movement strategies and the scale of the unfolding ecological crisis. Michelle convenes strategy sessions, leads political education workshops, and works in coalition 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. In that role, she organized with 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. Michelle was instrumental in launching the National Farm to School Project which later became the National Farm to School Network. 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 lives in Berkeley where she gardens with the extended Movement Generation family and her two lively daughters.