Michelle Todd is a Cork-based community organiser, mature student, and non-formal educator with over 15 years experience working across a wide variety of sectors, communities, families, and people. Currently completing her final year (first-class honours so far) of a BSc in International Development at UCC.
A combination of varied life experience, dyslexic thinking, a love of Terry Pratchett novels, and coming of age in the time of Rage Against The Machine and the Eels have given her a warm and empathetic generalist perspective. This allows her to weave together various frameworks and concepts like regenerative practice, circular economy, human rights, and community education into initiatives that aim to understand and meet people where they are.
As someone who came to formal education through community action rather than the other way around, Michelle’s work tends to find the gaps between silos; connecting community arts, zero waste, democratic education, and anti-bias work into lived, local practice. She has been recognised in the Cork University Business School (CUBS) Leaders of Tomorrow awards in both Teaching & Learning and Global Citizenship, and received the 2026 Quercus Top Mature Student III Award. She has recently been invited to join the committee of the Roger Casement Summer School in Dún Laoghaire, and looks forward to continuing the promotion of Casement’s legacy as an inspiration for future generations.
Her SDG action project draws on Ireland’s strong history of social and solidarity economies in areas where third-level education has often failed to reach. Drawing on a range of resources and concepts encountered through her own late arrival to university, she hopes to create a toolkit for people to customise table quiz and novelty events in their localities; bringing Global Citizenship and Civic Education directly into communities. With a healthy dose of humour, local knowledge, and play, the aim is to equip under-served areas with the tools to understand misinformation for themselves and embed the principals of the SDGs in daily life – rebuilding social cohesion and environmental action from the ground up.
A devout Pastafarian, strong supporter of the absurdist approaches demonstrated by The Portland Frogs in the face of US Authoritarianism, and Ordained Minister of both the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Universal Life Church; Michelle routinely observes the Pastafarian Condiments, AKA the “8 I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts” in all aspects of life as religious observations. Yaaarrrr .