2025 Community Leaders of the Year: Michael Jeans

In 2023, Michael Jeans was able to return to his alma mater, Shaker Heights High School, for induction into the school’s hall of fame. While there, he encountered a student who lived on the same street, Menlo Road — in fact, the same block — where he grew up.

The student told Jeans, the founding president and CEO of Growth Opps, “You’re a long way from Menlo.”

“I’ll always be on Menlo,” he replied, referring to the formative experience growing up in Shaker Heights, which it was for him.

“Despite the gap in years between that young man and me, there wasn’t much that separated us,” Jeans says. “I think that’s consistent with my leadership style. Whether it’s a homeless man on the street or a world leader, there are only a handful of events that separate us from where the paths are going to lead us. I see a version of myself in either of those characters.”

Jeans started his career in accounting, securities and banking. In 2015, he created Growth Opportunity Partners, which is also known as Growth Opps, as a community financial institution that combined his experiences in the financial sector. In 2020, he started Go Green Energy Fund, the first African-American led green bank in the country. His idea is to do good while doing well.

“Go Green Energy and our green work is a way for us to not simply invest, but to do it in a way that’s sustainable, in a way that doesn’t put money over the mission or capital over the well-being of people,” he says.

Go Green emphasizes sustainability both in the economic sense and in the environmental sense.

“If we’re going to support a finance project, a development project that is going to be inclusive of different income groups, we want to be sure that project is going to be located in a place that won’t be underwater in 10 years from the effects of climate,” he says.

“We know market events are typically cyclical. We can play our part and others do as well in contributing to a more
sustainable economy, so when market events happen, when markets are bearish, households aren’t decimated. It’s like a balanced investment portfolio.”

Jeans also contributes to the community with his role on multiple philanthropic boards. It started when he was 25, and he became a board member at Our Lady of the Wayside because of his financial experience.

He says his philanthropic and charitable activity represents the nexus of corporate and civic responsibility.

“I think there is something to karma,” he says. “I don’t know if it gives us more days, but I hope I have and can generate enough of it so that when I’m not physically present, my family and those close to me have a need, that someone will step up and do what I like to think I’d do in that situation.”  

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