Elizabeth Garlow, Co-Founder
Elizabeth loves to connect. From connecting deeply with other passionate change-makers to connecting the dots on our collective journey toward a more just, mission-driven economy, Elizabeth has dedicated her professional live to economic transformation and discerning the movements of the Holy Spirit
Elizabeth is the co-founder of the Francesco Collaborative, inspired by Pope Francis’s Economy of Francesco movement. Through her work, she supports protagonists of transformation that seek to draw on shared lineages of faith, spirituality, and wisdom to shape the economy. Elizabeth is a senior fellow at New America, where she focuses on structural reform and imagines new ways of building an economy rooted in wellbeing.
Elizabeth previously championed and led impact investing for the Lumina Foundation, served as a policy advisor with the Obama Administration, and co-founded a Detroit- based non-profit, Michigan Corps, which supported social entrepreneurs. She studied political economy at Kalamazoo College, completed her graduate work in public policy and economics at Princeton University, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in 2019.
Elizabeth lives in Michigan with her one-year-old and husband. These days, she is enjoying getting reacquainted with Michigan’s Great Lakes and apprenticing with urban farmers in Detroit. (Elizabeth’s LinkedIn)
Felipe Witchger, Co-Founder
Felipe co-founded the Francesco Collaborative to organize impact investors, entrepreneurs, and movement leaders and catalyze new culture changing possibilities. By restructuring power and participation in business and finance, Felipe believes we can unleash the courage, collaboration, and capital needed to tackle the social and environmental challenges we face.
Felipe was the Founding Executive Director of the Community Purchasing Alliance (CPA) where he spent 10 years building and operating a purchasing cooperative that was entirely designed, governed, and owned by its member churches, schools, and movement partners. In 2020, Felipe led CPA to mobilize $20 million in facilities contracts and solar projects, shifting 45% to Black and Brown-owned businesses. Felipe served for 4 years on the founding Board of Start.coop — an accelerator cultivating the next generation of cooperative businesses at scale.
Prior to CPA and Start.coop, Felipe led climate and clean energy research and business development initiatives at IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (now S&P Global) and Groundswell. Felipe holds a degree in Energy Studies and Economics from the University of Notre Dame.
(Felipe’s LinkedIn)
Kelli Hickey, Director of Formation
Kelli loves ultimate, moral questions and believes that they belong at the center of our economy and our lives. She is an avid collector of written wisdom and is most passionate about addressing questions of poverty, meaning, economics, and human development through a lens of Christian social ethics. Through her work, she seeks to restore and deepen our moral imagination through writing, advocacy, policy, and conversation.
Kelli spent several years at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, where she fell in love with Catholic Social Tradition and the way it inspires a faith that seeks justice – and how it beckons to be lived out, from the way we set our budgets and design our institutions to the way we send our emails and come home to our families. She holds a degree in economics from Yale University and completed her graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
When not pondering questions of faith or economics, you can find Kelli hitting the trails for a Sunday long run or relishing in time spent with her husband, Brian.
Paul Mitchell, Director of Education
Paul loves being a teacher and a student in equal measure, and dedicates this passion to serve the social mission of the church. He loves to learn from world-class teachers: Pope Francis, Sr. Meg Guider OSF, Sr. Judith Anne Beattie CSC, Paulo Freire, the natural world, and, of course, the Trinity.
He studied at the University of Notre Dame, the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, and in schools of popular education in Mexico and El Salvador. He has taught at a seminary in Uganda and at a Nativity School on the West Side of Chicago. He has coached teachers at a charter school in Boston and at a school designed for and run by refugees in Cairo, Egypt.
Paul also works as lead parent in a State Department family and serves as teacher for two young sons. He currently lives in Germany.