London School of EconomicsSU | Alternative Investments Conference
Michele Giddens is an Executive Director of Bridges Ventures. She has fourteen years of development and community finance experience ranging from large equity and debt investments to microfinance and small business lending. She 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.
From 1994 – 2001, Michele 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 was manager on lending programs that lent over $40 million to small businesses in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Romania and worked with microfinance institutions in the Middle East, Bangladesh and Mongolia.
In 2000, Michele was seconded as an advisor to the Social Investment Task Force. In April 2001, she began working on the establishment of Bridges Ventures.
Michele is a Director and former Chair of the Community Development Finance Association (cdfa), a member of the Small Business Investment Task Force, an observer to the Commission on Unclaimed Assets and a Trustee of The Young Foundation.
Michele has a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
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