Michele Giddens has ten years of development and community finance experience ranging from large equity and debt investments to microfinance and small business lending.

Michele began her career in international economic development with the Polish Development Bank, a World Bank-sponsored institution in Warsaw. She then moved to the International Finance Corporation, the private sector finance arm of the World Bank.

For the past seven years, she was at Shorebank Corporation, one of the leading community development banks in the USA, where she was a Managing Director in international advisory services. During that time she worked on development finance initiatives in a dozen countries in the former Soviet Bloc, the Middle East and Asia. She managed lending programs that lent over $40 million to small businesses in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Romania and advised on the creation of a microfinance company, Aspire Micro Loans for Business Ltd., in Northern Ireland.

In 2000, she was seconded as an advisor to the Social Investment Task Force. In April 2001, she began working on the establishment of the Bridges CDV Funds.

Michele has a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Georgetown University, Washington, DC.