About Michelle
As the Director of Operations, Michelle oversees a team that is responsible for building, maintaining, and updating Resonance’s corporate-level and project-level operations and compliance tools and resources. She serves as a company-wide resource to address a wide range of compliance and operations issues, including client relations and contractual, financial, personnel, grant and subcontract management. She also develops and leads trainings designed to build Resonance staff capacity on compliance and project management topics, including contract management, field-based project start-up, field project operations, in-country personnel management, field accounting and budget management, and grant and subcontract management. She also participates in business development by leading/overseeing cost proposals for large multi-million dollar budgets.
Prior to joining Resonance Michelle worked at a diverse set of organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, Chemonics International, and Booz Allen Hamilton – all of which gave her a nuanced understanding of how to address operational challenges within an organization as well as improve operational efficiencies on international development projects to set them up for success. She has over twenty years of experience working on projects funded by donor agencies including USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the World Bank in a wide range of countries including Nicaragua, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Colombia, Cambodia, Egypt, Jordan, Serbia, Gabon, Bangladesh, and Armenia. Michelle has managed projects through their full life cycle from start up to close out, facilitating and drafting annual work plans; monitoring budgets; setting up internal financial and operating procedures; hiring and managing both DC-based and overseas-based staff; and improving systems for issuing grants and procurement requests. She has held senior leadership roles where she has supervised and built capacity of both DC-based and local teams through one-on-one mentoring as well as group trainings. She also has extensive experience in proposal development, working on proposals in various roles including overall capture management, cost/budget proposal preparation, technical proposal writer, personnel writer, and management section lead. Michelle speaks fluent Spanish and intermediate Italian.
