Contributed by Michelle Maiuri, Director of Events
Founder, SeedFuture
Where From: Shenyang
Where now: Chengdu/NYC
What she's listening to/reading lately: The Art of Gathering
1. Tell me about your journey, what led you to founding SeedFuture and this work at the intersection of food, community, and regeneration?
I grew up on a small farm in northern China, which shaped how I see the world and what pulls me toward field-based, impact-driven work. I spent over a decade building my career in the U.S. across corporate finance, venture capital, and impact investing, and I returned to Asia in 2020 to work on what I'm passionate about: building pathways that strengthen sustainable food practices and the people who steward them. I built SeedFuture through deep field work, sitting directly with producers and community leaders and asking what exists inside their reality, rather than starting from theories built somewhere else.
What I bring to this work is the ability to translate between worlds: between origin and market, between field realities and capital. That's really the thesis of SeedFuture. Trust between producers and the brands or capital that depend on them is weak, not because these relationships don't exist, but because they exist in isolated pockets, at a very small scale, with no shared playbook, no visibility, and no stories told that would let anyone else find or trust them. SeedFuture's mission is to build trusted pathways between food producers doing real ecological and social stewardship work and the people, markets, and capital that can help them thrive, using origin journeys, storytelling activations, and community building as the vehicles.
2. SeedFuture is built around the idea that trust is weak and origin is often abstract, that you're making "what's working visible" through direct experience and storytelling. What have you learned about the power of bringing people into direct contact with producers, versus just telling them a supply chain story secondhand?
The core belief behind our origin journeys is that people need a direct relationship with producers and landscapes. A secondhand story asks someone to trust our account of things. A direct encounter lets people form their own judgment on the ground, and that judgment is what they act on afterward. We design every journey so the curated group is physically in the field together, experiencing it together, because who's in the room matters as much as where they go. That mix is what turns a visit into trust and relationship, rather than just a tour.
I've watched this play out concretely. Jason, a Bali-based roaster, joined our Bali journey and now sources coffee directly from our producer partners. It's on his menu, and we are planning educational activities so the grower communities can taste their own lot. That's a sourcing decision executed. An impact investor joined the same journey and published a piece carrying Bali's regenerative coffee story to an impact-investing audience. And a participant doing regenerative cotton and rural development work in India told us she returned with new ideas she could adapt into her own organization's programs and farmer communities, meaning the method itself traveled home.
One thing I've also learned, and try to stay disciplined about, is how easily this kind of work slips into extraction if we're not careful: extractive storytelling, extractive tourism, narratives that flatten real complexity into something marketable. So the harder and more important half of this is making sure producers are communicating their own value with dignity, on their own terms, rather than being narrated by us. Direct contact only builds trust if the people at origin retain real authorship over what gets seen and said.
3. What inspired you to join CINGS, and what has being part of this community meant for you personally or professionally? Any relationships or opportunities that have stood out so far?
CINGS sits on the line I've spent my career trying to walk, between the U.S. and China, and between capital and grassroots impact. After a decade in the U.S. across corporate finance, impact investing, venture capital, and philanthropy, and growing up on a small farm in northern China, bridging those two worlds isn't an abstract mission, it's the actual shape of my life. What drew me to CINGS specifically was that it doesn't treat U.S.-China connection as diplomacy for its own sake. It's built around tangible action, through the Giving Circle, mentorship, and a next-gen leadership community, which mirrors exactly how I think change happens: not through statements, but through people with real execution ability building trust and putting resources behind it together.
Professionally, being part of a room of peers who are also translating between American institutions and Chinese or Asian contexts has been valuable in a very specific way: it's rare to find other people fluent in both the impact investing and philanthropy vocabulary of the U.S. and the on-the-ground realities of Asia, and CINGS is one of the few places I've found that combination concentrated in one community.
4. At Serica, we often talk about the importance of paying it forward and strengthening the Asian diaspora community. What does giving back mean to you, and how do you hope to make an impact through your work and relationships?
For me, giving back means making sure the people closest to origin (community leaders, pioneer farmers, NGO practitioners, and social entrepreneurs) are never just the subjects of a story we tell about them, but active participants and voices within it. That belief is the reason I'm building the SeedFuture Origin Storytelling Scholarship, which subsidizes participation in origin journeys for people from origin regions and pairs it with a co-creation process where they help shape the narrative of their own communities rather than have it shaped for them.
The scholarship is the funding mechanism; a broader community-led storytelling framework, giving origin partners real authorship over how their stories travel, is the methodology behind it. Today this work is funded separately from our commercial programs, through grants, and the plan is to build a dedicated foundation over time, feeding it philanthropic funding alongside a defined share of SeedFuture's own commercial revenue, so the two stay accountable to different things: the company to revenue and repeatability, the funded work to who got access and what they built with it.
Coming from a farming community myself, I know firsthand that the wisdom needed to solve a lot of these problems already exists inside the communities living closest to the land. What's usually missing is trust, access, and a bridge to the people and capital who could act on it. Within the diaspora specifically, I see my role as building durable, honest bridges between capital, storytelling, and network access on one side, and practitioners who are usually asked to prove themselves before anyone will invest in them on the other, rather than being one more platform that extracts their story and moves on.
To learn more about CINGS membership and their upcoming programming, please go to their website at www.cings.org.
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