Michelle Smith

Michelle is co-founder of Circle Forward.  She also co-leads the Regenerative Governance Project, an initiative building and distributing open tools, training, and practitioner networks for the growing movement toward regenerative culture. 

 Michelle is a social transformationist, trainer and facilitator specializing in the living practices through which groups learn to weave their separate streams of action into coordinated, life-giving wholes.

With over 15 years of experience working with networks, cooperatives, nonprofits, and faith communities, Michelle helps people with shared aims transform how they make decisions, and how they relate to power, conflict, and each other. Her integrated approach draws on consent-based decision-making, Open Space Technology, Convergent Facilitation, and Nonviolent Communication.

As a participant in the Global Regeneration CoLab she hosts the weekly Regenerative Governance online meet-up.  She is a life-long learner who is currently pursuing certification though the Center for Nonviolent Communication. In 2018 she completed the “Leading through Facilitation and Engagement with an Equity Lens” course at Lenoir-Rhyne University. In 2020 she completed the “Network Leadership Training Academy”. She also participated in REI’s Phase 1 training and plans to complete REI’s training as opportunities arise.  In 2024 she completed “Leading Prosocial”, an integrated methodology to help groups become more cooperative, adaptable, and resilient.

She’s permaculture enthusiast who she gets inordinately excited about mutual aid and cooperative initiatives.  As a native of the Blue Ridge mountains of Westeren NC, she measures the quality of her summer by the number of times she gets to swim in natural bodies water.