Michelle Cote

Michelle Cote is the Co-Founder and Director of The Purpose Project, an initiative designed to inspire and equip the next generation of social leadership by capturing the accumulated wisdom of society’s most accomplished and experienced social changemakers. Prior to leading The Purpose Project, Michelle worked as a Program Manager for Aid to Artisans, an organization that specializes in the development of craft enterprises around the world. There, she helped plan and implement two three-year, multi-million dollar artisan enterprise development initiatives in Peru and Bolivia, navigate a transition of scale for a program in Colombia, and design and launch a pilot program in Afghanistan. Michelle is a graduate of the University of Connecticut where she studied the interface between sustainable development, the environment, and social change. Her honors thesis examined the impact made by a multi-village cooperative’s efforts to preserve their indigenous environment within the Ecuadorian Amazon through low-impact craft production and sustainable agriculture.