Michelle Long

Michelle Long is the founder of Jubilee Gift, an investment platform for building Beautiful Portfolios that are catalytic in healing the Earth, for equity and healing between people, and that build the spiritual ballast we need to meet these changing times. For wealth-holders with the furthest possible vision and intention, Jubilee Gift offers direct investment opportunities, advisory services, and unrivaled peer-to-peer learning journeys.

Prior to Jubilee, Michelle led the local-economy movement in the U.S. for 17 years, and in recent years has become known for supporting business and investor groups in applying wisdom practices to their work for transformative new solutions.

She was the founding Executive Director of BALLE, the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (now Common Future). BALLE is a North American network of more than 125,000 local entrepreneurs, investors and philanthropists. Founded in 2001, BALLE’s purpose is to nurture and curate the emergence of a new economy – one that will gradually displace our destructive and failing economy with a system that supports the health, prosperity, and happiness for all people and regenerates the vital ecosystems upon which our economy depends.

With a focus on real change within a generation, Michelle led BALLE to identify and connect pioneering leaders and to create transformative learning communities of practice including a Local Economy Investors Circle, the Local Economies Foundation Circle, and North America’s only Fellowship program dedicated to cultivating the emergence of a new economy.

In recent years Michelle has sought out “wisdom keepers” of various traditions to explore the practices that can bring us closer to our fundamental nature. This interest also led her to take a position on the Advisory Board of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Also related, she conceived of the Well-Being in Business framework and invited a team to create The Well-Being in Business Lab, a cross-sector initiative guiding prominent business owners, non-profit leaders and government officials to a deeper level of intention with themselves and their businesses.

Previously, Michelle was the founding executive director of Sustainable Connections, an organization that prompted NPR Marketplace to call Bellingham, WA, the “epicenter of a new economic model.” A regular keynote speaker, she was named one of The Purpose Economy 100 for North America.