Joanna Levitt Cea
Co-Founder

Joanna Levitt Cea is an advocate, researcher and strategist for funding and economic practices that lift up the well-being of all, and co-founder of Beloved Economies.

Joanna brings rigor, joy, and a deep commitment to co-creation to all she does.

Raised in a bicultural family of five, her mother's lineage is Irish Catholic, with many generations in the U.S. and specifically in Oregon since the late 1800s. Her mom worked as a stage actress, a public school teacher, and in running a busy and life-filled household. Joanna’s father's side is Eastern European Jewish, by way of three generations in South Africa, where her father had formative experiences as an student anti-Apartheid activist and where he earned a scholarship to attend graduate school in the US in the 1970s, a path that eventually led to him becoming a professor of civil engineering. Joanna grew up in Palo Alto, California, and found herself with lots of questions about inequality as her hometown increasingly shifted from a quiet college town to a global epicenter of tech and finance. Latin America called to her from a young age; multiple places in the region have shaped her; in particular, living and working in Ecuador for several years, where Joanna had the opportunity to support the advocacy campaign and legal case of the Kichwa community of Sarayaku to keep oil extraction out of their ancestral territory. Sarayaku is where Joanna first learned about the concept of buen vivir—and all it holds as a counter to our current dominant economic system.

Since that time, her work has been a combination of fighting against destructive international investments, re-imagining investment in service of buen vivir, and—via Beloved Economies—exploring how we can shift workplace practices and accompanying narratives to bring to life an economy that works for all. 

A leading thinker and practitioner in reimagining how we work and fund, Joanna served as the founding director of the Buen Vivir Fund at Thousand Currents from 2015-2019; Executive Director of International Accountability Project from 2006-2014; and prior to that worked as a Fulbright Scholar in Ecuador with the Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales, and as a John Gardner Fellow with the Center for International Environmental Law, in Washington D.C. She is a Board member of International Accountability Project and Kindle Project. Joanna holds a BA from Stanford University. 

As the years go by, Joanna is doing a better job of living the spirit of beloved economies outside of work, including by finding space and forms of abundance to enjoy what makes life good, with her son, partner, and two dogs.