Circles: Community Fund (Kingston Common Futures), Deep Democracy, Development, Communications, General

I am a pragmatic optimist, a voracious reader, and a hope-filled instigator, working towards a vision of the future that is joyful, abundant, and equitable.

Hélène (she/her) is inspired by the values articulated by Italo Calvino: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. In her daily work, she fosters connection, social impact, and access to aligned funding, working with community leaders, entrepreneurs, and activists to help envision, design, and build healthier economic and social ecosystems. She is a life-long student, and is currently focused on regenerative economics and how systemic change at all levels can be catalyzed by democratizing the control of capital. Her role at GWI spans program design, organizational strategy, fundraising, and communications, in addition to her shared leadership work as a Worker Trustee, and continuing to support the launch of Kingston Common Futures (a community-designed, community-focused fund). She serves on the boards of Start.coop, an accelerator for cooperative startups, and Co-op HV, a loan fund and co-op development organization that is a project of Seed Commons. She enjoys public speaking, writing, and acting as a mentor and coach to mission-led entrepreneurs and community-based initiatives. As a side hustle, she is incubating a new project to support the emergence of place-based community investment funds. In the recent past, she co-founded and ran a cooperative coworking space, and helped launch and manage social impact startup accelerators. To this current body of work, she brings fifteen years experience in her early career as a producer, curator, choreographer, and interdisciplinary contemporary artist, devoted to nurturing creativity and experimentation in media, art, dance and theater. She is an abstract painter, a backyard gardener, a dual citizen of France and the US, a mother of two, grateful to be rooted in the Catskills Mountains.