About
Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach is a lawyer, entrepreneur and activist, focused in the areas of conservation and sustainability, education and human rights. Formerly a Partner with the world’s largest law firm specializing in protecting investor, consumer and human rights, helping to achieve billions of dollars and corporate governance, marketplace and working-condition
reforms benefitting those harmed by abuses in those areas. She left in 2008, later founding her own firm, MCL Law Group APC, where she currently practices, together with serving as Of Counsel at Bottini & Bottini. In 2008 she was awarded Outstanding Consumer Advocate of the Year by the Consumer Attorneys of California WLC. She previously served as a consultant to the Liberian Ministry of Gender & Development advising on that country’s proposed constitutional revisions, having proposed specific gender-based amendments to the Liberian Constitution.
She is Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees of the University of California Press Foundation, and a member of the Board of UC Press, promoting scholarship in the areas of social justice, human rights and the environment; member of the Advisory Board of the Women Peacemakers
Program at the Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice which documents the stories and best practices of international women leaders involved in human rights and peacemaking efforts around the world; a talented singer herself, she is the President of the Jamie Shadowlight Foundation, providing non-conventional music scholarships to students of all ages seeking to further their musical training. Independently, she built and funds schools in Liberia, including the City of Refuge Christian Academy on Peace Island, Monrovia. She previously provided adult education classes and equipment for the disabled school at the Group of 77 Liberia, then run by Madame Boakai, First Lady of Liberia; built an IT computer center in Ghana; and a school in rural Haiti, including planting a school garden.
An “Advocate” for sustainable food and farming, she founded Berry Good Night in 2009 to galvanize the local sustainable food community in the Cali-Baja region. In 2015, she founded BerryGoodFood.org to tackle the barriers – educational, economic, systemic, and infrastructural – standing between our cross-border community and a local, sustainable, and regenerative food system. She remains Chairman of the Board of BGF
BGF has educated, connected and supported food producers and consumers through a variety of initiatives like school, orphanage and senior gardens on both sides of the border, including recent collaborations with TIAH to set up and install gardens/vertical gardens in migrant shelters for children in Tijuana. Since 2015, BGF has awarded more than $109,000 to local school garden projects through our Seeds for the Future school garden program, and has supported more than 46 schools, led 100+ instructional classroom hours, and built 55 new garden beds.
She is the host and moderator of the award-winning Future Thought Leaders series on the University of California’s television channel. To date, these 15 panel discussions, hosted on both sides of the border – focusing on food choice, human health, community and environmental impact to raise levels of consciousness in food consumption – have been recognized with 14 San
Diego Press Club Awards and watched by over 15.6 million viewers.
She is an Executive Producer of the documentary “Kiss the Ground,” documenting the role of regenerative agriculture in addressing climate change, and was an early funder of the documentary on the life of Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the American Farmworkers Union. An outspoken critic of GMO labeling policy, she served on the steering committee of Californians
for GMO Labeling. She opened the first Three Star Green Certified®️ (www.dinegreen.com) Bakery in California, is a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier, and was inducted into Disciples D’Escoffier.
She and her husband are patrons and collectors of indigenous art – Mesoamerican, African, and Oceanic – hosting and lecturing student classes from local high school and community colleges, the subject of an upcoming documentary film.
