CAFIID members are welcome to join our upcoming Gender Lens Investing Community of Practice meeting!
Thursday July 9, 2026 at 1pm EST on Zoom
This CAFIID GLI session will dive into the untapped potential of sports as a high-impact frontier for gender lens investing. By examining the intersection of commercial viability and social impact, this session will highlight how intentional catalytic capital can address historical underinvestments and drive systemic equity. Attendees will explore how aligning financial systems with a diverse sports ecosystem can create measurable gender equality, positive health outcomes, and lasting social inclusion.
Featuring:
Elizabeth Corrado, Investment Director at Firebird Collective
Michelle Cruickshank, Lead of Education and Child Development at Grand Challenges Canada
Jamie Mittelman, Flame Bearers
Elizabeth Corrado, Investment Director at Firebird Collective
Michelle Cruickshank, Lead of Education and Child Development at Grand Challenges Canada
Michelle Cruickshank is the Lead for Child Development at Grand Challenges Canada, where she advances innovative solutions that harness the power of play to improve child health, education, and development outcomes globally. Her work focuses on identifying, funding, and supporting bold ideas that use play-based and movement-centered approaches to strengthen early childhood development, and caregiver well-being, particularly in low- and middle-income settings.
With expertise in health innovation and systems integration, Michelle collaborates with social innovators, researchers, and community partners to scale interventions that embed play into health, education, and caregiving environments. Most recently launching Play Learn Thrive a fund to support children in crisis settings, in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. She is particularly interested in how structured and unstructured play can drive both developmental gains and long-term health equity. Through her leadership, she champions evidence-based, culturally grounded approaches that position sport and play as essential tools for resilient, thriving communities and for enabling every child to reach their full potential.
Jamie Mittelman, Flame Bearers
Jamie is on a mission to make sure that people of all ages are inspired by women athletes who look and sound like them. A deep believer in the power of stories to change lives, Jamie is committed to elevating as many diverse voices as possible within elite women’s sports. Her background is in media and international nonprofit work, having lived in Bangladesh working at the first liberal arts school for women in Asia and managing a $30 Million portfolio for the conglomerate of Yahoo, The Huffington Post, AOL, and Verizon. Her favorite work has always involved bringing together stakeholders such as when she helped create and execute a new track for a technology challenge in collaboration with the White House and Peace Corps. She holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). With support from Harvard University’s Innovation Lab and Women and Public Policy Program, Jamie launched Flame Bearers, a women's sports storytelling studio that has worked with over 450 exceptional women athletes from 55 countries. Her work has received 28 international awards. Jamie also received her MBA from Dartmouth’s (Tuck) School of Business, where she spent as much time as possible hiking and skiing in the woods. She holds a B.A. in International Affairs from Middlebury College.