Michelle Auerbach

is a world-builder and community-maker who uses all her geeky skills to support and educate change shapers. Michelle works as a consultant, educator, and writer focused on change shaping, creativity, and leadership for individuals, organizations, and communities. Michelle has been studying change and developing her change shaping practice for over 40 years.

She has worked with institutions (the NY City Department of Health, Kaiser Permanente, and The National Institutes of Health), organizations (from Fortune 50 companies to NGOs and nonprofits) and communities (through activist movements, consulting, designing change processes and facilitating), and she creates communications and storytelling strategies for universities, legislative change groups, and pro-social businesses.

Michelle was trained in facilitation and change management as well as individual and group coaching at the Columbia University School of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, and the New York City Department of Health as well as through movements and teachers on the ground. She was a professor of Ancient World Languages and Humanities for a decade and served as chair of the Arts and Humanities discipline for the State of Colorado Department of Higher Education. Currently, she teaches communication and story for changemakers at The University of Colorado and Sterling College.

Michelle was also trained as a chef in New York City at the Natural Gourmet, where she studied nutrition, Chinese medicinal cookery. She worked in restaurants and has done food writing for the New York Times, the London Guardian, and Sunset Magazine as well as other outlets. MIchelle has a particular passion for supporting food sustainability and justice.

Michelle’s PhD dissertation was written on story as a trauma sensitive change technology for individuals, organizations, and communities. She studies the way we respond to change from 6000 year old wisdom traditions to the neurobiology that drives our connected selves. She is the author of three novels and two books of nonfiction; you can find her at www.michelleauerbach.com.

Michelle is also the co-author, with EcoGather Director Nicole Civita, of a new book, Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in the Food System Through Relationship.