Our Team
The Ivanhoe Development team is passionate about empowering nonprofits and social enterprises to do their best work and scale their impact.
We have two main objectives when supporting our clients:
1) We increase and diversify revenue, 2) We build the financial infrastructure to ensure sustainability.
We want to work ourselves out of a job and see your organization thrive.
Founder & CEO
Michele Girard
Michele has been working with nonprofits for the past decade, funding, designing, and evaluating programs, training program staff, and supporting Senior Leadership teams in Minnesota, Colorado, D.C., Haiti, and Bolivia. Her passion for this work began at 20, when she was a Davis Projects for Peace Grantee, co-managing water provision programming in Haiti. She then worked for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Legislative Aide and for the U.S. State Department as a contractor designing educational programming for foreign delegations.
She most recently served as the Development Director for Little Earth, the only indigenous-preference Section 8 housing community in the Urban United States. She currently serves as a reviewer for private foundations, state, and federal agencies.
Michele attended the University of Maine for a B.A. in Public Policy and the University of Minnesota, earning her Master's in Development from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She was a University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment Acara Innovation Fellow and a Research Assistant at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. She is currently pursuing her MBA with a concentration in Finance at the University of Chicago.
Current Board of Directors Appointments:
Relevant Training/Certifications & Fellowships :
Philanthropy Fellow (AVPN & Cambridge Judge Business School)
Determining Appropriate Budgeting, Debt Financing, and Cash Flow (Cornell University)
Fundraising and Revenue Generation (Cornell University)
Michele loves working with small nonprofits providing direct social services support.
In her free time, you can find her trying to fly a plane, falling off a horse, choosing bad lines on a ski slope, or trying to fulfill her baking dreams of one day making Sourdough.
Aoife Ryle
Principal, Development
Aoife Ryle has spent the past decade in the nonprofit sphere, starting when she left a Bioengineering career to help increase educational equity and workforce access. Her experience as a first-generation immigrant to the United States shaped her desire to create opportunities and space for marginalized individuals.
Aoife has 10+ years of program management experience, including staff management, strategic planning, program design, evaluation, training, and grants management. She has developed program and evaluation plans for multi-year, multi-organization projects. Aoife has co-chaired an organizational DEIA committee and presented about equity at universities and conferences. A study about the impacts of programmatic work she co-led has been published in the Journal of Museum Education. Aoife is currently pursuing an MBA from the University of Illinois Gies College of Business.
She most recently served as the Education Programs Manager at the Connecticut Science Center.
Current Appointments:
City of Richmond’s Human Rights Commission, WomenRise Steering Committee United Way of Greater Richmond & Petersburg, Impact100 Richmond member
Relevant Training/Certifications:
Strategic Leadership Certificate (Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois)
Master's Degree in Management (Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois)
Social Impact Executive Fellow (Mountaintop International)
Aoife believes that no task done to increase equity and access is too small or unimportant.
Outside of work, Aoife enjoys reading the nerdiest books, befriending her neighborhood crows, and figuring out how everything works.
Maureen Corey
Administrative Assistant
Maureen Corey is a cultural arts professional with more than 20 years of experience in non-profit organizations, including exhibitions, public programming, and cultural operations. Maureen’s background as a museum professional spans curatorial projects, visitor engagement, project coordination, and community-centered arts initiatives. She has curated exhibitions with a diverse roster of artists, including Christo, Wayne Thiebaud, Hung Liu, and Betty Woodman.
She has written and produced numerous exhibition catalogs, taught art history at the university level, and organized public presentations featuring influential artists and academics.
Maureen holds a B.A. in English Literature and Art History and a M.A. in Art History from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She began her museum career working in education, interpretation, and volunteer development at the Kirkland Museum, Aurora History Museum, Denver Art Museum, and the University of Colorado. She has extensive experience managing exhibitions from planning through installation while collaborating with artists, educators, staff, and volunteers to create engaging public experiences.
Maureen is passionate about connecting audiences with meaningful cultural and storytelling experiences through skills of adaptability, organization, and collaboration.
Outside of work, Maureen can be found visiting museums, cycling, reading, watching mysteries, and wrangling dogs.